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⠄⠄⡟⣼⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠄⠄⠄⠈⠻⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣇⢻⣿⣿⣿⣿⠄⠄
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I'm only making a review because the negative ones speak to me on a parallel. Firstly, the main reason I got any of these is for the Steam bonuses (emotes, backgrounds, etc.) so I didn't come in with any expectations. Same for a lot of the other series. I'm going to recommend it despite its faults because at its core, the game isn't unmanageable.

Now, I'm not the biggest fan of this game. So why recommend? Because emotes and it's still nsfw if you're into that. And if you're diligent enough to get to Sayouri's most recent CG (which is the max difficulty puzzle), you get to actually see how the abilities work in tandem with each other. There's so much burden of knowledge where you can't dump into useless skills or the gameplay experience is lengthened by several HOURS. Yes. But when you hit the manual regen with a lot of solved pieces, a lot of powers (including the not-regen-actually-solves pieces) get work done.

For $4 this is absolutely worth experiencing at least once. It's a shame that the series has moved onto AI and isn't focusing on casual play. I got lucky and left my Secret Present at lv2, somehow got it to 50 through sheer item power based on what I knew from MNW4.

Now for the BAD.

-Bugs. Particularly game freezing bugs, skill lockout bugs which can make the game 3x harder (more blatant in MNW4 where I had to exit out of the game rather than title screen). There's some kind of auto-complete as well surrounding the item slot puzzles, which comes off as unintended. As per usual, the settings don't reload and aren't defaulted to all profiles, thus moving to a save will reset the settings. This bug has been documented on multiple games and the devs don't feel like fixing it.

-Better than MNW4 ONLY with context. Not that good for new players to the series. Now, in general the -% CDR items have always been garbage but they doubled down and kept them in the game despite them only mattering for Shimmering Flare and Peek. Thankfully no achievements are attached but you REALLY have to be here for the long haul to justify the gameplay side. My only tip is to get all abilities to level 1 and start dumping into the automatic regen. Completely misleading how these work, and no reliable descriptions are there. However, the manual regen FLASHBANGS YOUR ABILITIES. Why? How do you know they're up when you're on a 4+ second regen chain?

Anyway, Auto-regen will save you many headaches and will allow you to reliably refarm pieces for Choco Air Strike achievement. Everything else as per usual is a trap that needs you to know the game pretty well before spending points, and I'd argue the same for the items too.

I've never seen a MNW game where Chocolate Air Strike was outscaled so hard other than the earlier series where Solve Random / Auto Solve was the only choice that mattered. Color me surprised because normally this game series filled me such a high level of dopamine for the puzzle wombo combos that would solve all of the harder puzzles. On release, I don't think this game was even worth the effort. Most of the later puzzles make the powers feel weak (!?), and unlike MNW4, power-based solves don't activate other powers immediately (Time Bomb > Blast Wave was arguably one of the best interactions). Now, the Choco Air Strike achievement is GRINDY. And 100% completion is still doable within 2 hours! Granted, I'm seasoned. But this is disappointing.

-Localization? The English is poor and one of the choices asks for panties off when she's not even wearing any. I guess they're hoping the average fan isn't reading the choices anyway.

-The power creep takes too much time and there's not many puzzles that can handle it after a certain point. I do not feel any urge to replay this. This is especially because I played more fun puzzles in the prequels, so maybe you will enjoy this one more as you get through leveling.

And no, I was not here for the hentai. :')
Best regards.