Era Game Series: EratohoTW - Era Touhou The World
The first game we’ll talk about is EraTohoTW, or "EraToho The World", a parody of the doujin shooter series from Shanghai Alice. Here you play a character that has the obvious ability from the title, the ability to stop time. If that is inobvious to you, I recommend reading or watching Jojo’s bizarre adventure; the third part has the relevant ability, but enough of this tangent.
Ostensibly about growing your power to timestop rape the many characters in Gensokyo, when playing I actually started to successfully eventually successfully seduce the characters in-game before that ability became powerful enough; and after a while my character became a sort of mix of Moroboshi Ataru mixed with Kujo Jotaro thrown into a Touhou harem eromanga doujinshi, a strong, powerful lecher in a world where the girls after some wooing will welcome him into their beds.
I honestly feel that I sort of subverted an original intention of the game by doing this, but that I somehow played EraTohoTW as a Touhou harem eromanga doujinshi simulator doesn’t really leave me feeling guilty. I would even say that the game on its initial description sort of fails to present the living in Gensokyo element of the game that actually makes a surprisingly large part.
The basic play of the game is moving around from location to location in an area(ie. The human village, the bamboo forest of the lost) and interacting with the characters; talking with them, serving them tea(where it comes from is a mystery, your character seems to be able to pull tea out from nowhere), and eventually increasingly intimate actions like lap pillow, kissing, and various forms of touching. This is the “training” element of the era engine, basically, you’re acclimating a girl to you; when you gain enough affection she becomes more open to more intimate activities. There are plenty of diverse characteristics that characters can have, so they react to different levels of activity at different affection levels differently. Some may be open to sexual activity earlier than others and may be willing to engage in risky sex (ie. no protection against pregnancy) earlier than others.
The player’s actions occur in a timed environment, not in the sense that you have a limited amount of time for the game but that the environment has time, the character wakes up at a time(default 7 AM) and their actions take time, and the other characters have a schedule to which they act. The player has a limited amount of stamina and will return home after so many hours awake and they need to sleep(which is where they return to the BASE screen, and can change many options). Unfortunately I liked the romancing sim elements to the point that trying the time stop rape frankly was unappealing, turning the timestop ability into a quick travel mechanism and speedy sake brewing ability.
The game can be frustrating when starting out as it can feel as though your actions simply are ineffective, and they are. You have to level up your stats to get high enough score to really succeed at skill, though the first one or two ranks aren’t too bad to go up it can become a drag past that point.
This is clearly the training system implemented into a (basic)life sim in addition to the sex sim.
The game is actually surprisingly deep, with a lot of the subsystems seem to interlock; foraging gathers ingredients for cooking or making medicine, fishing catches fish for cooking(also the girls ask for fish a lot), interacting with other characters makes you speech skill go up which makes it so you can talk to other characters longer before the conversation goes dead, and even if it’s just a basic script the characters can be just frustrating enough to deal with that they give off a sort of illusion of living their own lives. If you can get past the initial difficulty curve, the game is definitely something I fully recommend, though I have no idea about the time stop sex part.
Good luck with that.
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