Bewitched ~The Witches of Remlia~

Bewtiched is a short and sweet RPGMaker H-game.  Theres not a lot to it, but it does a decent enough job.  Its not exactly a typical h-RPGMaker game, but it doesn't fall too far from the tree.

You play the son of a witch who was killed for being a witch.  For some inexplicable reason you wake up in the dimension of Remlia, the world made by witches.  The game never extrapolates how you got there, but essentially you were cursed to never escape, and all the witches want you for your essence.  Apparently witches in this game double as succubi.

Essentially this is a game over rape game.  You will fight a number of boss witches, and if you lose, they perform some form of sex act on you, and then its game over, and you have to load a save file. During battle, there is a gimmick in that the female enemies can do something seductive which lowers your MP.  Its kind of annoying since you only have 100 MP, and once it gets below 20 you get a status ailment that starts taking HP every turn.  Fortunately there are items and skills that can be used to recover MP, but its still annoying, especially when playing on the harder difficulties.  For the seduction moves, the bosses will have a cut-in graphic of them flashing their boobs, or panties, etc. Normal enemies don't have cut-ins, but do have some flavor text.  

You don't gain experience like a normal RPG, instead you gain Mana after battle.  Mana is basically a currency in the game, you can use it to purchase items, gamble in a minigame for random items, or you can use it to level up.  If you use it for leveling up, you have to balance it between the MC and the partner you bring.  It just makes grinding a little longer, but unless you/re playing on a harder difficulty, it never really became a problem.  There are 5 partners you can use, and you can only use one at a time.  Each partner gets their own ending,  I was never able to figure out how to trigger the ending apart from just playing the entire game over and over with each partner.

The artwork is good. Nothing amazing, but the girls are cute enough.  The CG art is consistent, although every h-scene has a pink sparkly background, would have been nice for more variance in the backgrounds.  I guess at least its not an image overlaying the map in the background, so I can't complain too much.  The downside is the sex scenes are very short.  Maybe like 10-lines of dialog and boom, done.  It can get a bit tedious getting all the endings, its seems you have to play the game 5 times, one for each character.  There is a New Game+, which resets all levels, but you keep items, and whatever unused mana (experience) you had (too bad when you first finish the game you have no unused mana because you don't know to keep any... ).  I set the difficulty down after finishing it once, so it was just a matter of going through all the dialog which takes about an hour to do.  Not exactly worth it: an hour each play through for a 10-line h-scene.  

Random encounters have some decent artwork, lots of girls showing quite a bit of skin, but the artwork is not consistant with the CG scenes.

Overall, Bewitched is a nice RPGMaker eroge and strives to be a little different from typical games in the genre, and I think it succeeded fairly well.  It does have it's downsides, such as the tedious grind for the lackluster endings, as well as the combat being a little annoying. The seduction cut-ins were a fun way to eliminate the monotony.   While the art is good, the sex scenes could use a little work.  I played the normal difficulty for the first play through, and it took about 5-6 hours to finish, but I switched to Very Easy mode to get all the endings which put me up to 10 hours.  I feel this is a solid RPGMaker eroge and is worth playing.