Dohna Dohna / ドーナドーナ

This is an old re­view rant about Dohna Dohna I post­ed to some ran­dom im­age­board with ze­ro edit­ing, be­cause I don't want to spend more time deal­ing with this dump­ster fire.

JXL (JPEG JXL) JPEG (orig)

I think I'm go­ing to write some re­view like thing af­ter I played some with the re­leased dohna dohna, sor­ry for the blog­post in ad­vance.
Cur­rent­ly I'm like 43 hours and 272k moon­runes in some­where in chap­ter 14 and I still have no freak­ing idea when will this end, but any­way. (Oh and fac­tor in that I suck at nip so I spend a lot of time look­ing up words).
Sto­ry wise, you're Ku­ma, a worka­holic and a mem­ber of the Nayu­ta clan, who are kid­nap­ping girls and force them in­to pros­ti­tu­tion to over­throw the Asou­gi Corp con­trol­ling the city. Or some­thing like that, try­ing to look good when you're not ex­act­ly good. Some­where I read that in this game you'll have to work for H scenes, and it's kin­da true, the game won't give them for free (there are 96 H scenes if I can trust the gallery, but so far there have been 4 H scenes that are part of the main sto­ry, and the last two... well, it's bor­der­line NTR, one gang bang and one ejac­u­late 5 times in 7 min­utes sta­mi­na, just in case you were hop­ing Nip peo­ple mirac­u­lous­ly re­ceived good taste). But to be hon­est, this has it's own prob­lems, there are nukiges where every­thing is sex and plot is just an ex­cuse, now this is like an an­ti-nukige (does that cat­e­go­ry even ex­ists?) where you have plot, and the oc­ca­sion­al H scenes are just there to piss off moralfags. I mean, the op­tion­al scenes can't con­tribute to the sto­ry be­cause they're op­tion­al, and the few not op­tion­al scenes don't mat­ter much, you can even dis­able H scenes in op­tions, you prob­a­bly won't miss much sto­ry-wise. The sto­ry is told through the usu­al VN like sys­tem, with­out any fan­cy an­i­ma­tion or Live2D or lip-sync or any­thing, H scenes are sta­t­ic CGs, but at the game is ful­ly voiced ex­cept Ku­ma and nar­ra­tion. (In­ter­est­ing­ly, Ku­ma has voice dur­ing bat­tles...) I would not com­ment about sto­ry-telling, there were a few in­con­sis­ten­cies and dis­con­tin­u­a­tions, but it's pos­si­ble that I sim­ply mis­un­der­stood some­thing, so take that with a grain of salt.
Be­sides the VN seg­ments, the game is di­vid­ed in­to 3 parts, the hide­out, haru­uri, hi­tokari (head­hunt­ing).
In the hide­out you can man­age your bitch­es and team mem­bers, but stuff at the shop and the likes. You can al­so, I don't know, so­cial­ize? with one mem­ber (se­lec­table from 3), you can get item or feels points for that. When you reach n times 1000 feel points, you can watch an event (in case of girls, usu­al­ly ero) then the char­ac­ter will lev­el up. At the end of the day, you can go ei­ther to haru­uri or head­hunt­ing.
In head­hunt­ing you have to nav­i­gate through a dun­geon (that looks like a sub­way map by the way), and fight en­e­mies and pick up some ran­dom items. You can't go back­wards. Al­so some­times you can find girls that you can kid­nap. That's the ba­sic.

The fight it­self is turn based, your and your en­e­mies char­ac­ters come in a seem­ing­ly ran­dom or­der, when it's your turn you can move your char­ac­ter for­ward/back­ward then at­tack/use a item/switch char­ac­ter. Each at­tack has a dis­tance, some at­tack on­ly works on the char­ac­ter just on front of you, some al­low to at­tack char­ac­ters be­hind. You gen­er­al­ly have 3 stats, HP (if it goes to 0 you die, duh), MP and VP/Volt­age. Each at­tack re­quires MP, but you can go in­to neg­a­tive, but do­ing that will grant you var­i­ous penal­ties. You start from 100 and I think the min­i­mum is val­ue is -120, but if you reach this your at­tack will be prac­ti­cal­ly worth­less. Volt­age gen­er­al­ly starts from 0 and in­creas­es when you deal dam­age or you take dam­age, and when you have a full VP bar you can un­leash some ex­tra pow­er­ful at­tacks (pro­vid­ed you un­locked it by rais­ing your feels lev­el high enough) that will use all your VP (and FPS). Pret­ty ba­sic but works well. Now the prob­lem is that there is no skip op­tion, when it's your turn you must do some­thing. Oth­er than want­i­ng to save MP in some cas­es, this is most an­noy­ing when you want to cap­ture a girl: when you step on a girl in the dun­geon, you en­ter a bat­tle where a girl will be one of the "en­e­mies". She'll have 10 HP so any at­tack will in­stakill her. Now, to cap­ture her, you have to de­feat her last (more pre­cise­ly, dur­ing your last at­tack, if you use some AOE at­tack). Now the prob­lem is that there are some char­ac­ters that can on­ly at­tack di­rect­ly in front of them, and some­times the girl ends up be­ing the first in line... For­tu­nate­ly lat­er as your char­ac­ters lev­el up and gain oth­er at­tacks plus your par­ty in­creas­es it be­comes less of a prob­lem be­cause you can just switch to some­one else, but can be an­noy­ing at the be­gin­ning of the game.
Now that you cap­tured a girl, what? Next day she'll show up in the garage and you can em­ploy her as a bitch (jin­zai ingame) pro­vid­ed you have free space, then go on a haru­uri to serve cus­tomers for mon­ey. Now haru­uri is NOT turn based, you have a row of cus­tomers and some time to choose a bitch, while you com­pete against the two ri­val clans, no skip op­tion here ei­ther. Now some me­chan­ics de­scrip­tion:
Each girl has 3 (4) stats: DEF (marked by a pill, green=ok, yel­low=small chance of get­ting preg­nant, red=high chance of get­ting preg­nant; a bitch be­comes prac­ti­cal­ly use­less if she be­comes preg­nant), and the 3 nor­mal: Looks, Tech­nic and Men­tal, with ranks of D, D+, C, C+, ..., A+, S, S+. Al­so they have 0-3 traits, like huge breasts, for­ward-look­ing and what­ev­er. When you go to haru­uri, cus­tomers have on­ly one stat: In­come, op­tion­al­ly a present (in­crease/de­crease one of the girl's stat or give her a new trait), and 0-3 traits they're look­ing for. Dur­ing haru­uri, you and your ri­val clans each se­lect a bitch, and cus­tomers gen­er­al­ly go to the one with the high­est looks rat­ing (in case of tie, ran­dom). Now, if you have a match­ing trait it works like a bonus to the LKS, so if you have LKS B+, while the com­pe­ti­tion has A, cus­tomer would go to there. But if you have a match­ing traits but the com­pe­ti­tion not, they'll go to you. (I think it just adds 2 to your rank, so your B+ be­comes A+ in­ter­nal­ly, and if you have B in­stead, you end up with A and ran­dom choice.) You don't have to re­mem­ber all this though, the game help­ful­ly dis­play a cir­cle above the girl when she will win, tri­an­gle->maybe, cross->no way.
So your girl got a cus­tomer, what now? You will re­ceive mon­ey, de­pend­ing on your tech­nique and the cus­tomer's in­come, and the girls stat will change.
So you need good looks be­cause oth­er­wise you won't get cus­tomers (it's like im­pos­si­ble to get any cus­tomers un­der LKS B in the sec­ond part of the game). You al­so want high TEC for mon­ey mak­ing, But what about MEN? As far as I can tell it doesn't in­flu­ence any­thing, BUT if it reach­es 0, your bitch be­comes mind­bro­ken and use­less. So you want to keep it on some sane lev­el.

So far so good. Now comes the bad part. I men­tioned that af­ter an en­counter a girl's stats changes, but how? It de­pends on the traits and maybe some ran­dom, but it gen­er­al­ly looks like: LKS small de­crease, TEC in­crease, MEN huge de­crease (1100 is nor­mal, where 1000 is a full rank). This means, un­less you want to throw away the girl af­ter two use, you have to do some­thing with that MEN and looks stat. TEC is not that im­por­tant, they lev­el up that pret­ty much by them­selves.
What can you do with the girls? 3 things: give her items, talk to them, and fuck them. Talk­ing to them will in­crease one stat by a minis­cule amount (some­thing be­tween 1 and 200 usu­al­ly), and fuck­ing them has pret­ty much the same ef­fect as a client fuck­ing her, ex­cept the mon­e­tary re­ward. Oh and each of them re­quire one TP (ex­cept giv­ing mul­ti­ple items to the same girl), and ini­tial­ly you have 3 TP each day. So items is the on­ly sane way, you would think.
Now how do you get items? You can get one ran­dom item from one mem­ber, if the RNG gave you that op­tion. You can al­so go head hunt­ing, and get some ran­dom items from the dun­geon. And you can al­so go to the shop, where you can buy... of course, you guessed right, the items the RNG gave you that day. Oh, and you can on­ly buy one piece of each item each day. And usu­al­ly you have a bunch of TEC in­creas­ing items which are prac­ti­cal­ly use­less, some looks in­creas­ing, and every oth­er day you might find a sin­gle MEN in­creas­ing item. Fan­tas­tic, isn't it?
Now, I get it, you're the bad guy, the in­ten­tion is that you're the bad guy, you just kid­nap girls, use them un­til they break, then dis­card them... ex­cept it doesn't work that way. 90% of the girls you pick up in dun­geons doesn't have high enough looks to get a sin­gle match, and if by some mir­a­cle you hap­pen to find a good look­ing girl, they will have ab­sy­mal TEC/MEN stats. It ac­tu­al­ly pays to have girls with S+ looks/TEC and sane MEN, but it's ex­treme­ly te­dious. I've done like 5 times more head hunt­ing that haru­uri wait­ing for the shop to re­stock items to keep my bitch­es good look­ing and sane, just to get some mon­ey so I can buy items to keep them good lok­ing and sane. This way I didn't make too much mon­ey, but in re­al­i­ty you don't have to make much mon­ey ei­ther, be­cause you can't buy any­thing in this fuck­ing com­mu­nist utopia of econ­o­my. To be hon­est, if not for the huge amount of H scenes that you can get from do­ing haru­uri, I would just say to skip this al­to­geth­er when not re­quired by the sto­ry. Al­so, I ini­tial­ly un­der­es­ti­mat­ed the talk op­tion, buy a few TP up­grades, and even though it's a ran­dom, you have like 1/3 chance of it in­creas­ing the MEN stat, some­times it's faster to talk to the same girl a bunch of times than wait­ing for that fuck­ing shop to re­stock any­thing. Save scum­ming is pos­si­ble but painful.

But wait, it gets worse! (Spoil­er, not be­cause sto­ry spoil­er, but me­chan­ic that you don't have at first). Lat­er the game that huge bitch that runs the shop tells you that there's a new way to make mon­ey from sell­ing the sluts di­rect­ly to some rich men. You get a list of re­quire­ments, a few days, and if you de­liv­er a girl match­ing the re­quire­ments, you get a huge lump of mon­ey. Sound good, right? Now, the re­quire­ments it­self are a 5 point list, 3 re­quire­ments for each stats (min­i­mum or max­i­mum, some clients love ug­ly or in­ex­pe­ri­enced or al­most mind­bro­ken bitch­es, it looks like) and 2 traits. Now, I al­ready men­tioned how hard is to ma­nip­u­late stats, get­ting a girl that have those two traits is al­so pure RNG luck (un­less you want to saves­cum for hours), so it's like you have a girl that match­es the re­quire­ments or al­most match­es and can be fixed in 4-5 days, or not. For­tu­nate­ly, you don't have to pass all re­quire­ments, you will just get less mon­ey in this case. But what if you re­al­ly don't have any­one to send, be­cause like it wants C or worse looks, S+ TEC and D MEN (so she'll in­stant­ly be­come mind­bro­ken) with two ran­dom traits that none of your girls has? Just skip it and don't send any­one? Wrong goy­im, if you do that, the event still trig­gers, and the girl that you didn't send will pass 0 of the re­quire­ments, and your re­ward is -600k yen. Yes, mi­nus six hun­dred thou­sand fuck­ing ingame pseudoyen coins. Send­ing a 5/5 girl will get you +500k, on nor­mal haru­uri a sin­gle girl will get some­thing like 60k at max­i­mum, just for com­par­i­son. If you don't want to go in­to neg­a­tive, you have to send a girl with at least 2/5 re­quire­ments. This one thing alone al­most made me rage­quit the whole game. I hope who­ev­er came up with this fuck­ing idea will die try­ing to give birth to an adult hedge­hog, I'm sure hell al­ready has a place pre­pared for them. The on­ly good thing is that your bal­ance can't go in­to neg­a­tive, so if you re­al­ly can't do any­thing just go to the shop and buy every­thing you can, then watch as your bal­ance be­comes ze­ro. I've done it a few times.
That's for now, I'm go­ing to take a short break from this game, most­ly to pre­vent fry­ing my brain, but I'm al­so sure it'll still throw a few un­pleas­ant sur­pris­es at me as I ap­proach the end of the game...

About 1.5 years lat­er I wrote a mi­ni re­view at vndb:

It has great art, the graph­ic style is re­al­ly nice, but that's about the on­ly pos­i­tive thing I can say about this VN. H-scenes would be al­right, if it weren't for Al­ice "we have to shove NTR in­to every­thing" Soft. The pros­ti­tu­tion man­ag­er part is bor­ing and sucks, the fight­ing parts is like if any par­ty is 2 lev­els high­er than the oth­er, it's a guar­an­teed win, and you can on­ly use 4 mem­bers at a time, so have fun lev­el­ing them out. The sto­ry is pa­per thin, you're fight­ing against some evil cor­po­ra­tion, but why is it evil you have to fig­ure out from con­tex­tu­al clues (and it's more about your ri­val gangs any­way), and the end­ing is plain rushed and very quite grindy if you want to get them all. In short get a CG dump and look at it, it's a bet­ter in­vest­ment of your time than play­ing this game.

And with that I'm done with this game. If you want a more use­ful re­view, I sug­gest read­ing quof's one, he's most­ly right.