Mamatoto review.

Mamatoto - The game is carried by the variety in its gameplay. Everything else isn't good or bad enough to really mention. However, the quality of everything drops massively after chapter 18.
	Tutorial issues - many things are poorly explained or not at all:
		Quite a few important mechanics are never explained:
			1) The game never tells you that dungeon fortresses end when their last enemy is beaten and therefore you'll probably be forced to replay your first dungeon because you avoided picking up the loot until the last enemy was dead (which is what every other floor had taught you to do).
			2) The game also never tells you that there's no relationship between your normal attack range and your special attack range, despite some character's specials allegedly just being "normal attack more than once".
			3) The commanders that work under your proper commanders aren't advertised anywhere - you've got to stumble on them in the menus.
			4) There's no hints of how many buildings are needed before your Kids upgrade, or even if they upgrade at all.
			5) Nanas mode event triggers are never explained. I'll complain about the NP system later, but this causes a lot of confusion and reloading.
			6) Nanas can only love one girl. This adds to the confusion caused by the previous point.
			7) The player is never told how some of Kakaro's events can prevent Nanas' events. Even after beating the game, checking a guide, and reloading, I still don't know for sure if I locked myself out of Arvy's events or not.
		The notoriously long tutorial is simply incompetent. You just click through and the game tells you how to works, rather than actually having you play through the game. I'm convinced that it skips over some things (e.g. Summons, Commanding Skills does, or how Item Cards aren't used to make Kids), but a tutorial where you don't play the game is such an incompetent way of teaching someone how to play that I could've easily seen this stuff and forgotten. Also, you can't skip the tutorial even after beating the game.
	Gameplay issues - the main part of the gameplay is too easy, but has enough variety that you won't care until it fucks up around chapter 18:
		The gameplay is too easy and frankly not all that good. However, it is addicting. There's enough variety in the types of fights that you'll keep hooked. The most fun that I had with the game was around chapter 5 or 6, because the game forces you to continue to deploy Kids/commanders until you've won. Because you're pushed to the limit, you can feel the pressure.
		Weapon upgrades are inconsistent. Sometimes they're awesome stuff like more movement or a special attack upgrade and other times it's +5% to an insignificant stat
		I don't like playing as both the protagonist and antagonist. It creates a conflict of interest. For example, you'll put off building that shop for quite a while because improving Kids is far more important than spending resources on H scenes.
		It's stupid that you're always forced to use the max size squad to defend the core. It puts you 5 commanders down for the next stage (e.g. an all-out attack where you use the next commander if you don't win) even if you only needed to kill one unit.
		A major issue is in how the game encourages you to level. For a start, being able to grind forever is a bit silly. But the problem is that the game can't decide if it wants you to overlevel one unit, keep everyone at a similar level, or have an elite squad of high level units. For example, the Nanas Points system encourages you to severely overlevel one unit. Because you give the points to the girl that you like and doing so gives them more special attacks, you're bound to use the same unit multiple times and overlevel them (by chapter 12, my Arvy was level 22). Furthermore, once you've done this, Cheer Kids become so absurdly powerful that you'll find yourself using no other commander or Kid unless forced and the game will become even easier. On the other hand, the game encourages you to keep everyone at a similar level because your average level determines the stats of your Kids, there's solo missions, and there are a few chapters where you can except to use every last commander. Finally, the game encourages you to make an elite squad of high level units because most of the time, you don't need most of your commanders (and the game will obviously be easiest if you focus on using the strongest ones). In fact, the final boss fight will be Hell if your best units aren't at an above average level.
		The gameplay gets much worse towards the end. Chapter 18 is essentially the same battle repeated 20 times and the final boss fight is notorious - even if you know how to beat it and gave Patton enough love, it's too hard and too boring.
	ADV mode issues - most of it is spent reloading:
		As alluded to earlier, the player is never told that chapter count matters for triggering events, fooling you in to thinking that NP is the only problem. For some girls, this can completely screw you. Arvy has an 11 chapter gap in her events!
		Unless you reload, there is no way to figure out who has new events. Not being able to save between the two visits (for either character) in this mode just makes it even worse. So many girls have their progressions locked that I feel like I'm doing nothing but reloading until I get four new scenes.
		Why is their no save between Nanas mode and Kakaro mode? Both require me to reload multiple times!
		The Nanas' Points system has other some major issues:
			1) You're given no info about the upcoming battles before spending NP, meaning that you don't know how to spend it.
			2) You only need 12 NP to clear a girl's story, but because you're never told that a lot of the event triggers are based on both NP and your current chapter count, you're going to spend quite a while giving the same girl NP. If you're lucky, you'll stop before you waste too much.
			3) The gap between assigning your Nanas Points and using them is so big that I forget who I put them on.
			4) Having NP requirements for Kakaro stealing your girls is insane. The game shouldn't be designed to steal what I've invested the most in to.
		Aside from the obvious H issues, there's also a couple of problems that are caused by Nanas only being able to love one girl.
			1) Nozomi can be put to Love on chapter 18, one chapter earlier than almost everyone else. If you don't know that only one girl can go that far, you'll most likely lock yourself out of everyone else's events without even knowing it. I was particularly confused when I saw Arvy be unable to tell Nanas about her rape despite her rapist being the guy that they're about to go off and kill.
			2) The game must require like 10 playthoughs to get all of the scenes. At the very least, you'd have to beat the last boss and reload several times.
	Character issues - I can't care about anyone:
		Nanas: His main character trait is being unbelievably naive. He seems to believe that nobody has any ill intent. This is mostly how Kakaro gets away with everything and often is part of what makes Nanas uninteresting - there's never any conflict when he speaks to someone and this is partly because he believes whatever anyone says. He was already a bad protagonist, but it's stretched to its breaking point where it's revealed that he never checked whether or not he could use Kids, the weapon that he's relying on to conquer the country. To make things worse, this could've been a good character moment but it's resolved almost as quickly as its raised. The only other conflict that I can recall him facing was with Kakaro, but that's clean cut. The only character development that I can remember him getting is in the very last scene of the game, where he finally does something about his naivety, but I think even that was only because I got Nozomi's ending.
		Kakaro: The game wants you to hate him, but I just can't. He does one or two things that piss me off in the right way (mostly with Murat?), but most of it is just rape. It doesn't help that I can't believe his tricks for breaking the girls or the excuses that the girls use to not rat him out.
		Nothing else about any of the other characters has stood out as particularly good or bad. They're usually completely uninteresting, assuming that I could even get their events to trigger. I really couldn't care about anybody. I can distinctly remember a point early on in the game where I cared so little about the characters that I couldn't even decide who to H.
	Writing issues - it's just generally weak:
		The plot consists of little more than attacking new places that I can barely remember the names of. Very late in to the game, it becomes clear that the authors lost track of them as well - Gaston is the last place that you need to conquer, but Sigmason is still fighting?
		The plot relying on the girls being too ashamed to tell anyone is difficult to believe. Avy's first scene doesn't even show how they're hiding the evidence after fucking on Nanas' bed.
		A lot of plot points rely on Nanas having an unbelievably good intuition.
		All of this gets even worse after chapter 18. For example, chapter 18 has the game comes up with an excuse plot for why you need to use every single commander in 21 back-to-back battles and this is followed by both the bullshit of Nanas not testing the kids and with Kakaro's joke of a backstory (somehow, while almost dead and using the last of his strength to escape, he managed to steal a baby).
		I can't believe that I'm saying this, but the Kakaro's Fun section is the best part of the game. The items that he buys have more personality than anyone else in the game. It's the only time where Alicesoft gets to do what they do best, H game humour.
		There's a few missed opportunities. The girls are still worried about telling Nanas what's happened between them and Kakaro even after they've decided to kill him!
	H issues - it's unfappable:
		The game seems to suffer from the classic old Alicesoft games issue of having scenes that are too short to be fappable. That being said, they might just be shit - three scenes in a row didn't even get me fully erect.
		Nanas has an incredible lack of H scenes. I beat the game without him having any and from what I can tell from the CG gallery, he only gets at most one CG per girl. Fortunately, Nana means grandmother in my dialect so I might've dodged a bullet.
	Music - it's Alicesoft, of course it's good.
Overall, despite the heavy criticism that I've given it, I liked this game better than a lot of other Alicesoft games that I played. Until the end game, the major issues are in the background and you spend most of your time on the gameplay, which is definitely the best part. Again, I won't say that the gameplay was good, I'll only say that it had enough variety to keep you hooked. Can I recommend it? No - you can find better SRPGs and there's not enough H here for that to be a factor. Can I recommend avoiding it? No, but only because of the gameplay. To conclude, I can confidently say that I'll never play this game again.