Didnapper

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Here we go, a full game around the Damsel in Dis­tress trope. Or the more fetish for­mat of it. I didn't have to look fur­ther, I al­ready want­ed to try out this game. Ac­tu­al­ly, this game is some­where in be­tween, so don't ex­pect any hard­core bondage stuff. Or any 18+ stuff for that mat­ter, this game is com­plete­ly fam­i­ly friend­ly! De­spite this, it's not a bad game, but I'm get­ting ahead of my­self.

The game is for­tu­nate­ly free, so you don't have to search for it for hours on ob­scure hen­tai shar­ing sites, you just go to the more-or-less of­fi­cial down­load page. (I mean, the orig­i­nal is on Fan­dom, but on­ly click on it if breezewi­ki is dead. Call­ing the fan­dom site an uber-can­cer on steroids is an un­der­state­ment.) You just have to in­stall the RMXP run­time, un­pack the game, and run it. Don't be­lieve what the down­load page says, it works (al­most) per­fect­ly in wine. Or, at least that's what I want­ed to write, but when I tried to run the game when writ­ing this re­view, of course it didn't start. I didn't do a bi­sect on the wine source, but it looks like wine 7.7 works. Wine 7.0 is too old, 7.16 is too new. So it's just wine, fix­ing one bug, cre­at­ing two new each re­lease, as usu­al. Don't for­get to in­stall core­fonts (winetricks corefonts) oth­er­wise you will have no text in the main menu.

But even with this there are some sound prob­lems. It's not too no­tice­able, as I fin­ished the game with­out notic­ing the prob­lem, but the thing is some back­ground mu­sics are MIDI files (hel­lo 80s!), and there's a wine bug the de­vel­op­ers didn't both­er to fix in 15 years... You can sort of fix it by winetricks directmusic gmdls, and you will have MIDI play­back, but that will break the in­tro video's sound and MP3 mu­sic in­stead, and it's not a good deal since there are a lot more mu­sic/sound ef­fects in MP3 than in MIDI. There were quartz er­rors in the log, some­what ex­pectable as I tried to mix the M$ and Wine im­ple­men­ta­tions, I've in­stalled the M$ quartz dlls, and ffd­show and every­thing, the on­ly thing I man­aged to achieve to com­plete­ly break the in­tro video dis­play... For­tu­nate­ly this ver­sion of RPG Mak­er stores mu­sic as plain files in Au­dio di­rec­to­ry of the game and the RTP and for­tu­nate­ly² it doesn't care about file ex­ten­sions, so in the end I just con­vert­ed every .mid file to .ogg with this mouth­ful used-to-be-one­lin­er:

find Audio $WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program\ Files/Common\ Files/Enterbrain/RGSS/Standard/Audio \
  -iname '*.mid' -print0 | \
  xargs -n1 -0P$(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo) sh -c \
  'fluidsynth -ni /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 "$1" -r 48000 -T raw -F - | oggenc --raw -R 48000 -q 10 - -o "${1%.mid}.ogg" && rm "$1"' --

Run it from the Did­nap­per di­rec­to­ry, make sure $WINEPREFIX is set, and back­up your shit be­fore as it will delete the .mid files af­ter con­ver­sion. (I tried to re­name them to sim­ply .mid.bak, but the en­gine couldn't han­dle that...) You could try to use timid­i­ty in­stead of flu­idsynth, but it gave me hor­ri­ble re­sults. Al­so cor­rect the sound­font lo­ca­tion if it doesn't match your sys­tem's, and ogg qual­i­ty 10 might be overkill, but I don't care, I have free disk space.

With that solved, the on­ly is­sue that re­mains is that when you start the game, and it tries to play the in­tro video, it will dis­play an er­ror mes­sage. It will nev­er­the­less play the video, just don't click OK un­til it's done, be­cause that will stop the play­back. And if we're talk­ing about in­tro video, here is it:

Cool Live2D like an­i­ma­tions by the way. Too bad the game doesn't have any­thing like that. And I've cheat­ed above, this is not the ac­tu­al in­tro video. You have three ver­sions of the in­tro video bun­dled with the game, IntroP.wmv, IntroQ.wmv and IntroR.wmv, the let­ters PQR are prob­a­bly ver­sion num­bers. The game us­es R, but above is Q which is as far as I can tell the same as R, but in high­er res­o­lu­tion. De­spite Did­nap­per 1.8.2 was re­leased in 2019, it still us­es RPG Mak­er XP, which means every­thing is 640x480 (which is al­so ridicu­lous, giv­en RPG Mak­er XP was re­leased in 2005, but Voodoo 2 in SLI could do 3D at 1024x768 in 1998. In 2005, I think I had a 1280x1024 CRT us­ing the cheap-ass HW I had at that time, but I dug up some stats from 2005, lament­ing how 800x600 is dis­ap­pear­ing. 640x480 is not even on the list, you have to go back one year, to find a whop­ping num­ber of 0.6% of users still us­ing 640x480. And no, that was around time when they start­ed to put a 3D ac­cel­er­a­tor in­to every VGA card, so draw­ing some fuck­ing 2D sprites weren't some­thing that war­rant­ed such a low res­o­lu­tion. But nips nev­er un­der­stood soft­ware, and RPG Mak­er is not the ex­cep­tion to this rule...). Any­way, this was the in­tro, you didn't lose any­thing if your wine didn't play it (try with a clean WINEPREFIX, I man­aged to fuck up my pre­fix by up­grad­ing/down­grad­ing wine ver­sions).

Story#

The game is set place "in a fan­ta­sy land where women are con­stant­ly bound and gagged," to quote the wi­ki. I like where this is go­ing. Any­way, you're play­ing as Su­ki, who's go­ing to be crowned, but just be­fore the cer­e­mo­ny she's kid­napped. And bound. And gagged. Like it should. Khm. So you end up in some un­der­ground dun­geon, the lair of a kid­nap­ping guild, and what do you do? Es­cape. Ap­par­ent­ly the guild has a prob­lem of many girls es­cap­ing re­cent­ly. Just... ig­nore this "you had one job" prob­lem, treat it as an eroge, where things don't have to make sense. So af­ter es­cap­ing the bonds and your cell (since the guard left the keys in a place where you can reach) and pick­ing up a dag­ger, you sin­gle-hand­ed­ly get rid of the guards, you run in­to the boss, who gives you an of­fer you can't de­cline. Yeah, turn off your mind, it doesn't make sense (it will make a bit more as you com­plete the game, though). So that's how the game starts, you got­ta help the kid­nap­per guild, in ex­change they will help you track down that trai­tor bitch.

Oh, and af­ter this, you'll have to change your name, to hide your re­al iden­ti­ty. I went with Nanashi as usu­al, but I'll con­tin­ue to re­fer to Su­ki as Su­ki (but you'll see some Nanashi in the screen­shots).

Su­ki: Cherisa? Cherisa... is queen?

Guild­mas­ter: Of course. She was next in line of suc­ces­sion af­ter you, was she not? The world be­lieves that Princess Su­ki is dead, killed by ban­dits on the road. In truth, La­dy Cherisa of­fered us a sum of mon­ey to keep you here, cap­tive but safe, while she took the throne in your place. She did, un­for­tu­nate­ly, ne­glect to spec­i­fy a time lim­it on your stay. I feel that we have held up our end of the bar­gain.

Su­ki: Why? How could she... how could Cherisa do this to me?

Guild­mas­ter: That’s a ques­tion you will have to ask her your­self... al­though that crown on her head may just have some­thing to do with it. As the queen, Cherisa will not be easy to reach, es­pe­cial­ly for a dead princess.

Got­ta ad­mit, this game has a sto­ry. Much bet­ter than what you could ex­pect from a ran­dom west­ern fetish game. It looks weird at the be­gin­ning, but the pieces will fall in­to place, as you dis­cov­er the coun­try you were sup­posed to be the next queen of (and it's not what you orig­i­nal­ly thought about it). My biggest gripe here is the pac­ing: you have the in­tro that I just men­tioned, then a long seg­ment where bare­ly any­thing hap­pen, then the last 2-3 mis­sions where you'll be in­fo­dumped on the world. Yes, I know, that was the deal, first you have to help the guild, and those mis­sions will not be as in­ter­est­ing from a sto­ry per­spec­tive, but it could have been done bet­ter.

If we're talk­ing about sto­ry, I must men­tion the end­ing. Ob­vi­ous spoil­ers ahead. Dur­ing the whole sto­ry, while Su­ki states nu­mer­ous times that she doesn't re­al­ly like this kid­nap­ping thing, she seems to grad­u­al­ly get used to it and start lik­ing it (just look at Pri­vate Cells be­low). Then cometh the end­ing, the Big Bad is de­feat­ed, and what hap­pens? Su­ki goes full moralfag, oh my all the wrongs I did, I have to atone for­ev­er, blah­blah­blah. She re­leas­es all her cap­tured en­e­mies, forces the guild to move to a new hide­out, leaves Cherisa be­hind, and goes in­na­woods with her friends. And she has the au­dac­i­ty to call this a hap­py end­ing! All char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment thrown out of the win­dow, just to fol­low some hyp­ocrite agen­da, or I don't know what... but this is one of the rea­sons I hate west­ern garbage, they al­ways have some hid­den agen­da you on­ly no­tice when it's too late. This end­ing lit­er­al­ly made me sick. Ac­tu­al­ly check out the bad end­ing, I'm in­clined to say that it's bet­ter.

Characters#

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• Su­ki: 「オレはSukiのことが大好きだ！」 (Sor­ry, I had to do this. Re­verse-ro­man­iza­tion (or more like the lack of it) is from here.)

  The play­er char­ac­ter. She's kind, car­ing, who ends up as a kid­nap­per against her will. At first, she doesn't like it, but soon she gets used to it (and I think she al­so starts to like it some­what). As the pro­tag­o­nist, she's a gener­i­cal­ly ca­pa­ble per­son in melee com­bat, and a mas­ter of ropes.

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• Carol: She was a thief before she ran into Suki and stayed. She's mischievous, energetic, easy-going, and also a switch, who likes tying up girls, but also likes being tied up. As a former thief, she's the only member of the party who doesn't bombard you with her moralist garbage (rather, she's full of "inappropriate" suggestions). She also has a crush on Suki. She would be probably happily living in an underground cell with Suki as long as they have enough rope to play with each other. In combat, she's focused on speed with high AGI, so she almost always comes first in a round, but on the flip side it also means that her attack and defense is weaker. (Even though her Poison Edge skill can be pretty strong, when it manages to poison the enemy.)

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• Athena: A former mercenary, who joins the group after you rescue her from her captors. Personality wise... well, she didn't leave a strong impression. She's strong and likes to do things her own way, but the group usually turns her down, and she has to follow the group. She's always quarreling with Carol, due to their conception on how to handle things are usually the polar opposites of each other. In battle, she's a tank: strong, high HP and defense, but slow as shit. Her Leg Sweep skill can be particularly powerful.

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• Evelyn: A freshman at the local mage academy, who joins your team last after she failed to fit in at the academy. She wasn't evil enough. As such, she's the turbo moralfag of the party, but unlike Suki, you couldn't call her a hypocrite. She always seeks to solve conflicts in a peaceful way, she doesn't want to fight anyone, even less tie up girls, it's not her fault that it almost never works out. In combat, she's a mage, so you get the usual: she has low HP/defense, she's also pretty slow, and if her SP runs out, and you're left with only her standard melee attack, well, at that point you might even stop trying, it won't make any difference. But her magic spells are really powerful, as long as you keep her SP up, she'll slice through the enemies. She also has a bunch of buff and debuff skills, if you learn them.

And apart from there, there are a bunch of side char­ac­ters. I can't be both­ered to write any­thing about them, there are just too many of them, play the game or read the wi­ki for more in­fo. This is not the game where you have 2-3 main char­ac­ters, and every­one else is a name­less throw­away char­ac­ter.

Gameplay#

The game plays like your nor­mal RPG Mak­er game, with all its usu­al idio­syn­crasies, but there are two unique me­chan­ics in it.

The first is used dur­ing the bat­tles. With male en­e­mies, you just beat them un­til their HP reach­es ze­ro, when they just dis­ap­pear, as usu­al. How­ev­er, girls' HP can't go be­low 1—in­stead they will start flash­ing red when their HP is low (be­low 5%, I think). In that case, you have to use the "Sub­due" skill, which is ac­tu­al­ly just a fan­cy way say­ing "tie that bitch up". Note that this whole thing works in re­verse too, so your char­ac­ters (whose are al­ways girls, ex­cept a few times at the very be­gin­ning) can't die, but they can be tied up. You win the bat­tle when you get rid of all male en­e­mies, and you tie up all fe­male en­e­mies, and you lose when all your girls are tied up. This has a few con­se­quences:

• This is a turn based game, where you have to queue all actions at the beginning of the turn. This is normally not a huge deal, as in RPG Maker games you can usually just attack the same enemy character, and if it dies, your characters will simply chose a different one. Not here, though, as female characters don't die. If you do this, your characters will just beat the same one character without doing any damage. You'll have to guess the damage you'll deal, and not overdo it. It's a bit annoying that you can only see the enemies' HP when you select them for attacking.
• Continuing from the previous point, you also have use your "Subdue" skill at the right time. After some time you'll learn how much your characters damage and their order, so you can attack and then subdue a character in the same round with pretty high reliability. Later Suki learns the "Subjugating Strike" skill, which does damage and subdues the enemy if her HP is low enough, but it has so high SP cost that it's almost never worth to use it.

• Tied up girls can be res­cued by oth­er char­ac­ters (think re­vive skill), but some­times they can al­so un­tie them­selves. If you tie up a girl ear­ly in the com­bat, ex­pect her to un­tie her­self. There's the "Se­cure Bind­ings" skill, which re­in­forces the bind­ings, can be use­ful to make sure some­one doesn't un­tie her­self, but it al­so has a pret­ty high SP cost, so un­less it's a high-risk char­ac­ter (for ex­am­ple she has a pow­er­ful spe­cial at­tack) you're usu­al­ly bet­ter just ty­ing them again af­ter they un­tie them­selves. (When they un­tie them­selves, their HP doesn't in­crease, so you can eas­i­ly tie them again.)

  Car­ol has a se­mi-hid­den pas­sive skill, called Masochist, in which she ran­dom­ly heals her­self while she's tied up. Cute.

The sec­ond dif­fer­ence is the es­cape minigame. When you lose a bat­tle, most of the time you don't get a game over screen, but in­stead you're cap­tured, tied up, gagged, and thrown in a cell. It al­so hap­pens a few times dur­ing the nor­mal sto­ry.

Leroy: So, lis­ten up. Usu­al­ly, when you’re tied up, you’re gonna have three prob­lems. Your arms and legs will be bound, and you’ll prob­a­bly be gagged as well, even if it’s not strict­ly nec­es­sary.

Su­ki: ...Why?

Leroy: Gag­ging a girl is its own re­ward.

I like this guy. The es­cape minigame... not much. You can "strug­gle" at three places, gag, arms or legs. Each time you strug­gle, you have ar­rows ap­pear­ing on the screen, you have to press the cor­rect di­rec­tion­al ar­row, and if suc­cess­ful the strength of the bind de­creas­es. If not, you make some cute sound... and not sure what else, I think the game told you some­thing about this in the ini­tial tu­to­r­i­al, but I ac­ci­den­tal­ly skipped that text and it nev­er both­ered to tell it again. Khm. If you free your mouth, you can make sounds, to lure the guards to your place, hop­ing they will help (and not make your con­di­tion worse). To be hon­est, I nev­er tried this me­chan­ic, it looked too risky. (It has noth­ing to do with my non-ex­is­tent so­cial skills in re­al life, I swear!) If you free your legs, you can move around the room you're in, and hope­ful­ly you can find some tool in the room that will help your es­cape. If you free your arms, you won.

Now, you have a thing called es­cape lev­el, which ba­si­cal­ly de­ter­mines the times you can use strug­gle be­fore a (re­al) game over. Now, don't do what I did, don't lis­ten to Leroy when he says to train es­cap­ing at the be­gin­ning of the game. I went and tried all dif­fi­cul­ty lev­els, every me­chan­ic, etc., so I end­ed up with an es­cape lev­el of 5. Very bad idea. With that my es­cape lev­el was OP for the re­main­ing of the game, even though I on­ly did the manda­to­ry es­capes, I nev­er failed any com­bat that you weren't sup­posed to fail. But on the oth­er hand, as I men­tioned, I didn't like the es­cape minigame, so it's prob­a­bly bet­ter that way any­way. It's an­noy­ing, but nei­ther in­ter­est­ing nor fun, you can just brute force your arm strug­gling and es­cape with­in the time lim­it, prob­a­bly even on the low­est es­cape lev­el, ig­nor­ing all these ex­tra fea­tures. Get­ting your feet or mouth free is eas­i­er, but the bonus you get from them bare­ly mat­ters. Just take a look at this video:

(I like how can she move her up­per body, with­out mov­ing her legs or head even a mil­lime­ter.) This is the hard­est prac­tice es­cape, with the game set to the hard­est dif­fi­cul­ty, on es­cape lev­el 5. First I tried to free her legs first to show off how you can find some ran­dom hid­den items to help you, but ap­par­ent­ly on the hard­est lev­el you don't get any help, and try­ing to free her arms af­ter the legs was too much, and I ran out of time.

Fi­nal­ly, one more thing that you need to get used to is that you can't open your nor­mal RPG Mak­er menu any­time, you can on­ly open it when you're near a blue chest. This means that not on­ly you can't save your game any­time, you can't even change gear or use your items when you're not next to a chest. It's not the end of the world, but you need to get used to it.

Leroy: Fi­nal­ly, see that blue chest over there? If you need to change your clothes or your gear, use that. You can al­so do some­thing called ‘sav­ing’ there, but I’m not too clear on it. Maybe there’s a pig­gy bank in there.

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The main game­play is pret­ty straight­for­ward, you have a bill­board at the hide­out where you can start the next mis­sion, and be­tween mis­sions you're free to ex­plore pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed places, se­lect­ed from the min­imap. (Got­ta ad­mit, the min­imap looks a bit cheap, like it's some ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed ter­rain from Ter­ra­gen...) There are al­so a cou­ple of side mis­sions that you can trig­ger while wan­der­ing around the some­what open world. I say some­what, be­cause you can't go back to every pre­vi­ous lo­ca­tion (but you can re­play old mis­sions), and usu­al RPG Mak­er lim­i­ta­tion of "every map is 5 cm² at most" to break im­mer­sion as much as pos­si­ble. The mis­sions are quite straight­for­ward, go to place A and kid­nap girls or go meet some­one... then hell breaks loose, and you have to some­how get out of the mess. But... it's not a hard game, I mean I played it on the hard­est lev­el, and while at the very be­gin­ning of the game it gave me some trou­ble, af­ter I get used to the game and com­plet­ed the first few mis­sions to have more than one par­ty mem­bers and mon­ey to ac­tu­al­ly buy items and skills, it was a smooth sail­ing. I found it quite easy, and I'm not a huge RPG play­er. You play this game for the sto­ry and fan ser­vice, not the ac­tu­al game­play, that's on­ly bare­ly bet­ter than your av­er­age fetish RPG game.

One thing that I liked in the game, the Tro­phy Hall and the Pri­vate Cell. In some mis­sions and side mis­sions, you can cap­ture some pres­ti­gious girls, they will be trans­ferred to the Tro­phy Hall, to keep them as a tro­phy. You can ex­pect what does mean, tied up, gagged, and thrown in a cell. They will be your harem... no, sor­ry, this is not an eroge, but you can take them to the Pri­vate Cell, where you can give them dif­fer­ent out­fits, gag or un­gag them, and have some ba­sic in­ter­ac­tions with them.

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The Tro­phy Hall and the Pri­vate Cell, with every pos­si­ble char­ac­ter cap­tured. Please note that there's a small cheat­ing here, as you can't have Su­ki and Car­ol tied up at the same time, it's just the mag­ic of stitch­ing to­geth­er mul­ti­ple screen­shots.

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The girls nor­mal­ly have on­ly one out­fit (the de­fault), you have to ob­tain the oth­er out­fits scat­tered around the world in chests and ran­dom (side)-quest re­wards. (I'm not sure whether every­one has ex­tra out­fits or on­ly se­lect­ed char­ac­ters, I cer­tain­ly didn't find ex­tra out­fits for every­one.)

The bad thing about this fea­ture is that it's a bit shal­low. What you can see above is every­thing. There's a hid­den skill for every par­ty char­ac­ter that you can learn by in­ter­act­ing with them in the cell, but oth­er than, you won't lose any­thing if you skip this fea­ture. The cap­tured char­ac­ters have some kind of mood stat, they can hate or love, but I don't think it changes any­thing with par­ty mem­bers, and you don't get to re­lease non-par­ty, so it mat­ters even less with them. Still, I've spent a lot of time here, but on­ly to sat­is­fy my fetish re­quire­ments, not be­cause it made any (ra­tio­nal) sense.

One room left you have the Hold­ing Cell. There are a few "Cap­ture Zones" on the world map, where you can cap­ture girls, and re­turn­ing to the lair you can sell them. How­ev­er, it doesn't pay well, so it's go­ing to be grindy to get any mon­ey here. (Ac­tu­al­ly, my biggest prob­lem here, is that when you try to cap­ture a girl, you have a QTE-like thing, and I fail it 9 times out of 10, which means I have to bat­tle the girl. They're fuck­ing weak­lings, so it's not a prob­lem, but it wastes time.)

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And prob­a­bly there are a lot of small ran­dom shit I'm for­get­ting about, but this re­view is al­ready get­ting long, so I'll stop here.

Graphics, music, etc.#

See­ing a lot of fa­mil­iar tiles? Yeah. I mean, it's a free game, and at least there are lots of unique char­ac­ters, and they have prop­er art, plus some CGs (even though it looks like they were made by dif­fer­ent peo­ple, the art style is dif­fer­ent). And by prop­er art, I mean, it's noth­ing to write home about, but it's still 1000 times bet­ter than what you have in your usu­al west­ern fetish games. Plus it for­tu­nate­ly has cus­tom mu­sic for most ar­eas, so that's a bonus. (The side mis­sion video above is one of the few ex­cep­tions with its 028-Town06 BGM. But as I said in the be­gin­ning, I haven't no­ticed MIDI play­back doesn't work un­til I fin­ished the game, and all stan­dard RPG Mak­er BGM is MIDI, so I might be a bit skewed here.)

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Conclusion#

In over­all, de­spite the short­com­ings, this is a sur­pris­ing­ly de­cent game, giv­en the cir­cum­stances. I'm not sure whether the lack of any 18+ con­tent is an ad­van­tage or a dis­ad­van­tage here, there have been many places where I'd en­joy a bit more fanser­vice or even some light H con­tent, but giv­en that it's a west­ern game, there's a 90% chance that it would ru­in the game (the end­ing on­ly broke the end­ing of the game, while bad­ly ex­e­cut­ed H could ru­in the whole game), so maybe it's bet­ter this way.

Didnapper 2?#

I know they re­leased Did­nap­per 2 at the end of 2021, but if the project his­to­ry (Fan­dom) of Did­nap­per 1 is any in­di­ca­tion, I don't think there will be any point in check­ing out Did­nap­per 2 in the next 5-10 years. Plus there's no Su­ki, and it's no longer free, so it'd be a bit more has­sle to get...