Lovely Heroines (PC)

When it comes to creating a game that hinges on its adult content, you have to include something to compete with the incredible amounts of free erotic content available online. There are a few methods to entice players to buy the game: have high quality art assets or animations, provide an interactive experience where that content is the reward for good performance, or essentially write it well enough either in its story content or like a traditional piece of erotica. Simply presenting images of naked people isn’t the kind of substance people desire from a video game, and while the visual novel Lovely Heroines almost seems like it had other intentions besides being a vehicle for its art, most of its content outside of the images falls flat.

Lovely Heroines advertises itself as a funny superhero parody, but very little of this really features in the game’s writing. The plot involves a nameless male main character acquiring a very unusual power… and a very unclear one. Seemingly granted super strength and maybe other skills like flight and energy projection and deflection, the player’s strength is not actually all that superhuman to start with, but they are able to increase their power by sleeping with superheroines. A terrible evil is threatening New Dork City and the world, so it is up to the player to find and bed the four superheroines in the city who can help him with this goal. While the superpower’s requirements are certainly silly, most of the humor is very weak and repeated constantly. For example, an ineffectual villain named MEISTER LORD!!!, capitalization and punctuation required, makes repeat appearances, each time the same few jokes are made about the name being said improperly, his defeat being incredibly easy, and the characters barely remembering him. Something that works at first is ground into dust through repetition, and while it does have an interesting payoff, the path there is paved with the same overused jokes.

The writing on the four main heroines isn’t much better. While there is a fifth heroine, Lady Luck, who serves as your mentor and thus gets off better in that she has much more time to establish herself while she delivers a lot of the exposition, the four girls are all romanced in the same exact way. The only interaction in Lovely Heroines, besides the basic visual novel elements of progressing the text boxes by clicking, are the choices about which location you’ll go to next and when you visit the area where you face the great evil, your ending determined by how many of the women you had sexual encounters with. While a few of the endings are drastically different enough to make checking them out interesting, for the most part you just need to romance every girl by first going to the location you’re meant to meet them at and then find them in their follow-up location to sleep with them. The first encounter essentially establishes who they are, each one having a certain pronounced character trait that usually is pretty clear already based on their appearance. Umbra is the reserved goth girl, Sonata is the energetic skater woman, Parsec is at least a bit less immediately apparent since she’s both nerdy and strict, and Flare’s minimalist design actually makes pinning her as the heroic type a bit more difficult. They are very one-note characters who you only get to know a tiny bit about, their designs more compelling than their plain personalities and minimal character history. Still, you talk with them once at one location and it’s not even really an attempt at seduction, but at the next location you will have intercourse with them after only a bit of lead-in.

Here’s where things get a little funny. If you do not have the adult patch installed, this is pretty much the full extent of the game. Things cut to black when things are about to get steamy and your character says the encounter happened, and without this patch, the story is incredibly empty, rushed, and full of repeated humor. 18+ patches being separate doesn’t seem to be a requirement on Steam anymore although it perhaps helps with visibility or sales, but without it, Lovely Heroines shows that it really has little interesting story or humor to lean on. The game just doesn’t work as a standalone visual novel without its erotic content. However, it would be unfair to evaluate the game on a hoop it felt it had to jump through for one reason or another, the patch definitely meant to be the intended way to play despite it being a bit funky to install and requiring a guide to integrate into play at the moment.

When Lovely Heroines has its 18+ patch, its erotic scenes do their job despite not being totally exceptional. Animations are incredibly limited in the game, mostly reserved for things like what appears to be an attempt to lip sync the text box only dialogue but it didn’t seem to always trigger for new text boxes. Limited audio doesn’t help sell the scenes much either, but the art is at least quite good for the style it’s going for. The comic book look is well done in the backgrounds and the main menu filled with parodies of famous comic book moments and covers, and the girls all have a very clean cartoon look that isn’t compromised when the game whips out the more detailed images for the naughty scenes, a level of parity sometimes not achieved when visual novels try to impress with their high res CG scenes. Some small discrepancies are present, Lady Luck not always having her freckles between images and the girls looking very strange in the game’s Steam store banner, and Parsec is hard to make out with disheveled hair and while not wearing her glasses. The art is good for what it is though, but it’s also not quite as abundant as many players would like. Each girl only has two still images for the erotic portions they’re featured in, the game trying to present unique angles with almost every one and potentially disappointing players if the girl they’re interested in loses the posing lottery. Hinging so heavily on around ten pieces of art across the four superheroines and Lady Luck is a pretty poor approach for a game that essentially needed its adult content to pick up the slack for its usually bland and repetitive writing, but the writing does at least handle the erotic scenes well. It’s neither outstanding nor cheesy, but does its job in selling what the still images cannot. It’s definitely not going to redeem the game that it didn’t mess up the writing there, but at least it is possible its one major appeal might sometimes be effective enough for its intended audience.

THE VERDICT: Lovely Heroines has a decent artist working on it that can make nice comic book backgrounds and appealing leading ladies, but the limited room they have to work means Lovely Heroines depends solely on a smattering of adult imagery and nothing else. Its humor is repetitive and weak, its characters have flat personalities, and the heroines are only interacted with just enough to establish who they are before they play their role in the plot and are then put aside. If it had been funny or the game fleshed out the heroines and your interactions with them then it wouldn’t be so dependent on its small amount of adult content, but the writing surrounding it is mostly just functional. The comic book art and superheroine design is squandered on this bare bones visual novel.

And so, I give Lovely Heroines for PC…

A BAD rating. There are certainly the types of players who will just use the skip function to get right to the juicy bits of Lovely Heroines and those scenes aren’t bad despite being so lean in content, but providing context for them can increase the enjoyment of that content, and that is what Lovely Heroines lacks. We get to know the girls on a very basic level and romancing them barely deserves to be described with such a weighty verb, the process so quick and convenient that there’s barely any lead up to the player’s hero sleeping with the girl. If the humor had been done better than it could be just passed off as a comedy with some saucy bits, but the game isn’t creative at all, rehashing the same lines in a game that’s so short it’s impossible not to notice the recycled jokes. Lovely Heroines could have instead made the surrounding content more substantial, flesh out the girls and your interaction with them so it’s less about just getting to still images of them naked, or it could have even just provided more adult content to focus on its art and acceptable erotic writing. Instead, most of the experience is clicking through plain chats that abruptly shift to sexual subjects.

The art of Lovely Heroines is good, but not enough to make up for the weak experience otherwise. The writing of this visual novel is almost purely to get enough information out there to set up the appropriate scenes. It’s not like it’s a chore to read through the small story bits to get to the juicy stuff, but it does little to enhance what amounts to ten pieces of titillating art that are almost just as effective without the game context around them.