AI INFESTED
Developer Milfylicous made a point to include AI into his games. The premium games already had the option to switch to AI renders of his characters at certain points, but this update takes the absolute cake when it comes to AI. With AI engines now being able to imagine full videos from a single or a few still renders, a lot of possibilities are opened. Chapter 0.36 is literally infested with video content, often multiple samey videos per story moment. The quality is average and would probably look great on a mobile phone. At 1080p on a big screen, the definition just isn't there yet. Not to mention the inconsistencies.
You would think that having this much content would be a good thing. Unfortunately most of it is quite shallow in terms of animation, and completely devoid of storytelling. The fact the developer uses both Nicole and Elsie of all characters for this, which are arguably the favorites from the original mansion, doesn't seem like a strong choice to me. Make no mistake, the videos absolutely show a new age of visual AVN is about to happen. It just seems incredibly hit and miss when it's presented this way.
The above video is an example of an animation that sort of works for the environment it's based in. A slow kiss, shared between master and servant. The video below however, serves obviously for the pleasure of the viewers, but has no impact or cohesion to story whatsoever. And the game it filled with these trivial animation videos, eventually filling the game size to well over 11GB. That's a more than double increase for mostly mediocre AI-rendered video content. There's something great here in the future, but at best these between renders are average.
You don't actually pick a video possibility and expand on that, you just look at variations of the same moment. Some might put a heel to a leg, others might see Elsie do a bunny hop dance. It's technically impressively made by AI, but doesn't do anything storywise. In fact, I'd say this is the shallowest the series has been as of yet. This game would benefit from clear direction, picking one or two animations and keeping them in line with the story.
CHOICES & MEANING
So the new mechanics the dev introduced was response paths that change how a love interest behaves during the path. Because of the AI generation, it's hard for the developer to finetune what happens in a scene. That adds to the shallowness of the episode, with us randomly falling into John having a moment with Nicole. We then skip her in favor of Elsie, which makes sense given their attraction, but the first time in Chapter 1, Nicole actually joined Elsie if you remember correctly. It's these character inconsistencies that come up to play when dealing with AI content, even though the video generation is impressive.
I'm going to throw a bold statement out there that the developer doesn't need to do anything with. This game might have overstayed its absence of the mansion so much, that the mansion feels like a total afterthought. I'm happy to see the characters return as they were my favorites, but if all of the interactions are as shallow and storyless as these, I'd rather the developer stick to the family fun on Rachel, Kenna and Esmeralda's end. At this point, they should just be two separate stories.
Original review: Milfylicious: Chapter II (v0.30)
Developer: Maximus
