Written by Flamecaster, edited by Otaku Apologist
“Tropical Liquor”, developed by Tentacle Games. A hentai visual novel / color matching game, and dating simulator available on Steam for $9.99, with a free Denpasoft adult patch to restore the sexual content. Released on March 9th, 2017. Genitals are censored with mosaics. An enjoyable trip to a hot tropical island with even hotter babes drawn by Sayori, the artist behind the popular visual novel series Nekopara.
The game features sweet, intense sex scenes interlaced with plenty of fanservice segments.
STORY
You’re a man working as a part-timer, hopping from job to job. Suddenly you win a tropical vacation of your dreams. The location of your vacation is a luxury resort island. Wasting no time at all, you take your childhood friend Naomi with you on the trip. You fly to the island paradise and begin your erotic hentai adventure.
On location, you are quickly introduced to the vast diverse cast of future love interests, each getting a simple intro just to establish their personalities. After briefly getting to know each one of the ladies, you finally decide to change your aimless existence forever by getting a girlfriend.
If all of that seemed quite rushed to you, that’s because it is. Tropical LIquor does not dilly-dally, and within the first 15 minutes of the game, you’ll have all the tutorial information you would ever need to play the game competently. Apart from introducing you to all the lovely girls you’ll soon be wooing, Naomi, happily chosen to be your tutorial instructor, explains how the puzzle and simulator gameplay functions.
No respectable dating simulator can function without its cast of well-characterized, potential better halves. While Tropical Liquor doesn’t disappoint in this aspect, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies when you take a closer look at the female cast. The best way to describe all the girls is that they all represent popular tropes commonly found in Japanese fiction.
First, you have Naomi, the childhood friend. She also serves as the surrogate little sister cock sleeve. She calls you “onii-chan” every chance she gets. Next up is Anna, the perpetual tsundere tour guide that cannot turn off her conflicting personality for even a second. Following this is Lisa, the owner of the resort. Lina is a rich girl seeking to get out of a rut, to travel to new, and exciting places. Offsetting the previous girls is Ema, a small, stacked brown girl that, despite her meager physical size, exudes the mature vibe of a caring older sister. Almost in contrast to Ema is Kei, a sporty martial artist with a childish, but adorable personality. Symbolizing all the charms of a yamato nadeshiko is the traditional Japanese beauty, Sakurako, a very naive, but incredibly friendly maiden that has trouble interacting with men. Juxtaposed to Sakurako and Kei is Karen. Karen is a beautiful, petite and fragile silver-haired girl hiding a bitter secret. Last, but not least, is Erika, the protagonist’s former classmate and the token serious girl with just a hint of sass sprinkled in.
With all the female choices Tropical Liquor offers, you generally get what you see in the first few minutes of any given conversation. There are very few surprises in store for you, if you’ve watched any anime in the past two decades. While the over-reliance on tropes may be tiresome to a lot of players seeking more depth in character portrayals, Tropical Liquor is self-aware enough to make the girls slightly nuanced, giving most of them short, compelling story arcs. Without those slight touches, the game would feel very uninspired, which is, unfortunately, the case for the title’s gameplay portion.
GAMEPLAY
For the very soft-sounding bells and whistles of the game’s character histrionics, the way Tropical Liquor plays feels like the afterthought of a very tired developer. On your path to bedding the girls, your character has to go through the motions of talking to a girl, learning some facts about them, and, lastly, increase his affection level. Your island sex tour lasts 30 days, enough time to work up the courage to make a girl yours.
In other more complex dating simulators, the player is usually given the options of completing varied sets of tasks. These tasks each improve one or more different player statistics, which in turn translates into unlocking specific character routes and progression of the plot. Money in such games is usually just another road to increasing the feelings of affection of your female target. In Tropical Liquor, money just buys things. As the game divides the daily clock into two periods of morning and evening, the player gets a choice: venture out during the morning to talk to girls and learn new things about them, or work half a day, or work the whole day earning money to buy specific presents that unlock the option to play the color-matching puzzle Liquor Game with the girl of your choice.
The Liquor Game is a traditional in-universe drinking game. It’s a simple puzzle game where the player has to memorize a combination of differently-colored titles representing ice cubes in a tall glass of alcohol. Once the booze is poured into the glass, all the tiles turn into the color of the poured drink. The player must match the right tiles together. A successful round of the Liquor Game depletes your love interest’s stamina pool. The game concludes once you or your opponent has made too many mistakes, and ran out of stamina. In specific situations, as the player’s affection with his female companion grows, the girls will gradually strip all of their clothes until they are completely nude, save for a small band-aid covering their pussy slits.
While there are power-up items you can buy in the shop (along with other presents for the girls), they don’t necessarily add much complexity to the puzzle gameplay. The power-ups help you in various ways during the Liquor Game by affecting the participants’ stamina levels, or your ability to see tiles obscured by the drinks, Even as you unlock higher affection levels with the girls, and venture into higher difficulty levels of the Liquor Game, the tile patterns stay pretty much the same. By your tenth session, you will have subconsciously memorized a few of the repeating patterns.
Usually all you need is three rounds of the Liquor Game per character, to maximize a girl’s affection level. The rest of your clean sweep towards a love confession, will be spent learning trivial personal details through short conversations. Luckily, for the dull slog that the puzzle and simulation sections are, there is an erotic payoff.
GRAPHICS
It’s probably not a secret to many eroge enthusiasts that Sayori, the popular Japanese artist behind the immensely notable Nekopara series, has loaned her talents to Tentacle Games. Not only did she bring her A-game in terms of mega cute character designs, she also made sure that once the girls take their clothes off, you will rub one out. While the stripping parts of the Liquor Game, and the dating parts resulted in cliched, but humorous wardrobe malfunctions due to the main hero’s clumsiness, those aren’t the only sexual content the game has to offer.
MUSIC
The music in Tropical Liquor is standard visual novel fare. You find this kind of music in most other titles in this genre. It’s pleasant, bubbly, and doesn’t overstay its welcome too much. During the Liquor Game, all the characters have their separate themes playing, further diversifying one sexy fling from the next. You might even find some of the tracks catchy enough to listen to them after your adventure is over. Just don’t expect any bombastic rave music.
VOICE ACTING AND SOUND EFFECTS (SFX)
What makes the sex scenes in Tropical Liquor so enjoyable is the spot-on voice acting performances of the girls. From the luscious, moist kisses, to the moans and groans during intercourse, every single voice actress put everything she had into helping you get an eargasm. On a personal note, if you ever wanted to hear a woman’s brain simply melting in the throes of pleasure, I recommend you pursue Anna’s route first.
HENTAI
Once you successfully confess to your most desirable companion, you will be rewarded with a short, but surprisingly intense sex scene. With all pretense out the door — and perhaps a little uncharacteristically for some girls — they all turn into heated cocksucking cum-guzzling sex maniacs, resulting in fountains of love juices and several orgasms during just one night of lovemaking. There’s a decent amount of sexual fetishes covered during those very brief sex scenes. As you may expect from a game focused on romantic conquest, most of the intimate encounters start off pretty vanilla but soon evolve to cover a wide array of sexual positions and kinks with women that you wouldn’t normally expect to get down and dirty like that. Variety is the spice of life, and I’m glad Tropical Liquor understands this. Sayori maximizes the eroticism of the visuals by with an expert use of angles, perspective and use of vibrant colors on aptly drawn, silky smooth skin. Oh, and defined muscle tones, most pronounced on the more athletic girls, like Kei.
CONCLUDING WORDS
Tropical Liquor has an equal amount of good and bad things going for it. The amount of joyless grinding it takes to access the very enjoyable hentai moments can get frustrating. Most good porn games suck me in even when I’m not particularly in need for sexual relief. With Tropical Liquor, I was forced to take many breaks between play sessions in order to not get burned out with the lackluster gameplay. Considering the game is very short, I cannot honestly recommend it to anyone but the biggest fans of Sayori’s artwork.
You can download Tropical Liquor at Steam.
