I liked this one a lot.
I watched the whole thing straight through, but if I had been a dedicated gamer, I guess I would have gone through ONLY to the point of the bonus (or finish) round, finished then, and then NOT looked at the Epilogue scenes that appear afterwards. The whole thing is a long set of "challenges" which have time-points for you to retreat to, at the end, if you do finish.
If about five "Canto" (full videos) are eventually made, then the whole thing can add up to a bunch of different scenarios and endings, kind of like beginning to build a fantasy universe in which the adventures presently are rather limited but the world map is open-ended and can be further extended. It comes along with some Magick-the-Gathering style game-cards of special Wizard type skills -- psychic divorce, for example, allows you (or, uh, your "character") to forget something, thus making any multi-day repeat punishment shorter by a limited number of days. So, the punishments and their antidotes are starting to be introduced into the world-map.
Each challenge is a scene with a time-index to which you're supposed to leap if you finish early; at which point you'll learn your character's subsequent fate, a fate dependent on which choices you made (including when to finish) during the first viewing of the video. Fun. But too elaborate for me. I lost count of how many Virtue Points I had earned -- multiple of 15, was it 90? 75? -- and I wasn't interested in going back to figure it out again. In fact, if I were all horned up, I don't think I would have wanted to bother with the fast-forward button in order to go to the proper point where an Epilogue would tell me what my fate was. It's a little bit TOO much of a story video, not ENOUGH of a porn-whack-off video.
The choices of women were right up my alley of preferences. They're all "skinny" or "young looking", the type that would appear on WowGirls.com or MetArt.com, not a lot of monster-sized fake tits and not a lot of slatternly over-the-top sexualized behavior. Instead it's all rather innocent-appearing and sweet with a youthful and almost wholesome appeal. This is nice to look at, though it doesn't really always get to the level of HEAT that I would like. Anjelika (a.k.a. Krystal Boyd) is the main focus of the whole fantasy story, for example. Yeah, I could fantasize about her ... oh yeah ...
The production-values were very high. HD images, cross-fades, well-done video editing, bump-notes visually stuck in there at key moments, etc.. Liked all that.
The beat-meter worked just fine. The visual beat meter, and the auditory stroke-beats, and the musical backbeat, all matched properly (golly! it's a rarity these days) although sometimes the sub-division of stroke-beats didn't exactly match the stresses of the musical phrases. Some people above in this thread have referred to this discontinuity as being "out of synch" or another similar phrase -- but, actually, it's not out of synchronization, it's well synchronized, but it is out of meter or out of meter's stress (or, I dunno, you figure out a term), less of a problem for most people to match the beat. I personally didn't find it a problem at all (it was only mildly off-putting for me, a little like dancing the Foxtrot, a three-beat dance step which you nevertheless always dance during four-beats-to-the-bar music). I did notice that the auditory stroke-beats (the extra "thump" added over the music, on every beat that you're supposed to stroke on) were easier to pick out when I was listening with head-phones, so I bet anyone who's having a difficult time finding which beats to stroke on, could probably solve the issue simply by putting on some head-phones. Generally it's easy ENOUGH to get the beat, that you don't feel like they've somehow tricked you into screwing up and getting the beat wrong. And it uses some delays, and some very slow stroking, both of which seem missing from many recent releases. The super-slow stuff gets to me, boy, that's the way to finish me off early ...
I found that the type of action depicted was a little tame. It wasn't very hard-core at all, not even when it accelerated at the end to the super-duper finish. Therefore, although I really liked all of the specific chicks who were picked, I found myself a bit dulled out by the action after a while. My reaction started to go something like: yeah yeah she looks good, there she is again looking good again, hmmph whatever ... . I wanted point-of-view blowjobs, fucking, and lots of it, by the time I had worked my way through literally an hour of this thing. It wasn't quite there, so the big finish was disappointing to me.
Overall I give it a very high mark. Like, A or A-plus. But for the lack of super-hard-core, it's ideal.
Straight to the top!
