Seven Pirates H Review

Ah, to be an ocean-faring pirate in an anime world… Sun, sea, monster girls, monsters shaped like genitals, monkey-like Booby Kins… Okay, so the second part of that sentence isn’t like the first one is it…

Seven Pirates H is a JRPG by Felistella & Compile Heart, and published in the West by Eastasiasoft. If you’re a fan of Compile Heart like I am, you’ll realise how weird it is that Idea Factory International didn’t publish this title as it usually does, as the two companies do a lot of business together. However, while there is usually quite a bit of fanservice in Idea Factory games, it’s usually just that and doesn’t require you to level up characters by rubbing their breasts. That’s an actual gameplay feature, and I’ll get into that later.

Originally released under the title Genkai Tokki: Seven Pirates on the Vita, it was the fourth entry in the Genkai Tokki series after Monster Monpiece, Moero Chronicle, and Moero Crystal H, all developed by Compile Heart. Seven Pirates H doesn’t continue a story from the others, and honestly is a different genre entirely since those were dungeon crawlers. The only similarities are the aforementioned levelling up mechanic, and the fact that your team is made up of monster girls.

You play as the sole human in this adventure, Parute, a pirate who winds up in the Monsupi Sea somehow. She’s convinced that she’s been chosen to find some legendary treasures on account of a seemingly broken compass dropping on her head. She meets Otton, a boy monster (the apparent opposite to a monster girl) who helps make the compass work, and they begin their quest together. Along the way they meet many monster girls, some of whom join the crew, six join you, while the others want to kill you for a handful of reasons.

As Seven Pirates H is a JRPG, that means you walk around levels getting into fights with monsters — sorry, H Monsters — which then pull you into turn-based battles. You can try and touch them from behind for a preemptive attack, but if the reverse happens they get to attack first. In battles you can attack, use skills, use items, defend, or try to escape; all pretty ordinary. Skills require MP (Mura-mura [sound effect for sexual attraction] points) which increase during fights or when using certain items. Once a character’s MP reaches the maximum amount they enter Arousal Mode which boosts their attack, defence, and speed stats for five turns — it also allows them to use a powerful special move.

As you explore the Monsupi Sea you will need to complete tasks for the Booby Kin, the region’s premiere shipbuilders who look like little monkeys. They also run shops and can craft things if you give them enough of certain items. You can locate Booby Kin in dungeons or just around the ocean, and the more you unlock the better equipment you can craft and items you can buy. They can also help out in battles by using MP to heal or cause positive and negative status effects.

The main thing you’ll be using the Booby Kin for, however, is fulfilling their requests. Kill a certain amount of a particular enemy, pick up items littering dungeons, obtain items from fights that have a frustratingly low drop rate… All kinds of fun stuff that can be a bit repetitive due to those drop rates. Only some of the requests are directly related to the main quest though, so you don’t have to complete every one of them.

Okay, we’re like 500 words into this review, so I should probably talk about touching breasts. Unlike most roleplaying games, Seven Pirates H doesn’t have traditional levelling up. As you defeat H Monsters you get H Extract from them, and once you have enough (I’m still not sure how much that actually is) Otton will exchange it for Booby Training Extract. Using this and other Extract that you obtain from treasure chests and such, you go into the special Booby Training menu and grope each character in a variety of ways to increase their stats.

It’s a little more nuanced than just randomly feeling up your pirates, and while you can use the analog sticks it’s very clear the touchscreen is how you’re supposed to do it. I could list how each motion — flick, pinch, tap, press — alters the stats or explain how rotating clockwise increases or decreases the size of the breasts, but I honestly still can’t remember. You can bring up the controls at any point which is great, because I had to look it up every time I wanted to increase HP or ATK stats. Did tapping increase the firmness or the softness? Did I have to pinch in or out for more cleavage? Not a clue. Suffice to say that bigger boobs means that they have more health, smaller ones increase their speed.

Equipment can also increase your stats as you find, buy, or craft bras and panties throughout your journey. Well, panties change stats, bras usually add a passive or battle skill. Don’t worry, while they have different names and change different stats, you don’t actually see the characters wearing them. They have one set for Booby Training and that’s as much as you get, even if you get a skill that increases stats if a character isn’t wearing panties.

However, something I didn’t realise until a few hours in is that increasing one stat in Booby Training doesn’t decrease another one. So my team went from having torpedoes on their chests, because I wanted high health and attack, to having more naturally shaped breasts as I rounded out their stats.

Some of this might be down to the fact that the translation is imperfect. I thought that Arousal Mode caused your character to be knocked out and have to be revived, but they just enter a cooldown phase. The characters kept talking about a furnace that was supposed to be something about magma? I’m pretty sure Poron is supposed to be a ghost, but everything about her says skeleton…

The music is a bit of a mixed bag, though all of it is pretty upbeat. Some of the tracks are fun to listen to over and over, but others made me want to get out of the menu or fight or whatever as quickly as possible.

The graphics are perfectly fine, though it’s clear that if anything has changed since the Vita version it’s minimal. The drop-in distance is the most obvious sign of it being an older game, for instance.

Okay, so the reason I think that Eastasiasoft had to publish this in the West for Compile Heart is because Seven Pirates H is a horny game. I didn’t even touch on “Egg Break” where you find eggs as you explore dungeons and “hatch” them in Booby Training mode to get items (or cover your ladies in raw egg). Or Otton Charge, the ability required to finish off some bosses that charges by rubbing breasts vigorously (or tapping the A button). Or how Saqra’s Arousal skill vores the enemy. Or the fact that the H Monsters literally look like genitalia, condoms, secondary sexual charactaristics, boxes of tissues… I could keep going, because there’s just so much of this — one of the monsters is a UFO shaped like a breast, piloted by a smaller breast, with multiple breasts orbiting it!

While Seven Pirates H clearly belongs in Horny Jail, that doesn’t make it a bad game. It may be somewhat poorly translated, levelling up may be repetitive and tiring, and some of the music could be better, but it’s actually pretty decent. A single playthrough will run you about 10 hours though, so at £34.99 it might be priced a little high if you only plan on playing through once.