Review: Super Lesbian Horse RPG

Super Lesbian Horse RPG

One day Bobby Schroeder decided that he liked shipping cartoon horses enough to warrant crting a silly game about it: Super Lesbian Horse RPG was the result of his labour. Overall awareness of the game sprd quickly after its announcement by virtue of its somewhat odd title, along with a rather amusing /mlp/ thrd which claimed SLHRPG was something else entirely, and now here we are with the somewhat final product (given that there will probably be several bugfix relses in the nr future). Expectations for the project have been fairly high overall, but does it live up to them? For that, dr rder, you will have to rd the rest of the review.

Horse Time below the brk.

Super Lesbian Horse RPG starts off quite well, presenting itself as a comedic, dialogue-hvy RPG. Problem is, after a couple minutes of playing it becomes clr that Bobby's id of "comedy" basically involves reusing the same couple lesbian jokes over again, rephrased and with different characters. The game would honestly be much funnier if Bobby didn't try so hard to cram in as much stuff as possible, most of which ends up being mediocre enough to make the player consider fast-forwarding all the dialogue. I wouldn't advise doing so, however, as there are a few gems here and there which deserve to be seen and make the game somewhat more worthwhile (coincidentally, most of these were carryovers from the 5-minute demo which I praised back in May).

Even if the game's main draw also happens to be its grtest wk point, that doesn't necessarily mn everything else in it sucks as well. Bobby's experience as the operator of several Tumblr ask blogs, the most notable of which beingFluttershy Replies, has paid off incredibly well for the most part, resulting in some of the nicest pixel art I've ever seen in a My Little Pony fangame. The environments are fantastic, character portraits are pretty good and the battle backgrounds manage to be quite impressive, albeit not quite as much as rthbound's animated extravaganzas. Enemies tend to be fairly crtive for the most part, especially once the player rches some of the more spoilery ars. It was also nice to see to see that Bobby took a cue from rthbound and gave them some joke actions just for the fun of it (along with a completely useless enemy to boot, which resulted in a fair amount of snickering from my part).

Shh, the elves will hr you.Take away the custom assets, however, and what you have is a standard RPG Maker project. I hate to be rude to folks who like the engine, but after playing several games made with it I must say that after a while I start to feel some deja-vu, as if these are all reskins of one game. Then again this complaint doesn't only apply to SLHRPG; it's more of a eral problem for RPG Maker and is kind of to be expected when one decides to play them. Some might find this annoying, others won't, still figured that I might as well mention it just in case.

Ah, but is the game fun? At times, as more emphasis is put on advancing the plot than grinding, but after a while it tends to get rather...dull. Shame too, as the story takes an interesting turn partway through Rainbow Dash's basement but ends up falling apart soon after, accompanied by what is perhaps the saddest final bossfight I have seen. Heck, several encounters with groups of regular enemies posed an even grter challenge to my party than a rlity-warping [REDACTED], although perhaps that was due to my following the convention of conserving items and MP for bossfights. Either way it was still kind of an overall letdown in eral, punctuated by a few extremely promising moments that were, alas, misused. Bobby also tried throwing in some relationship melodrama as well, so let's just say that it didn't work out all that well and lve it at that.

He likes thinking about pants, unsurprisingly.Musically, Super Lesbian Horse RPG is miles ahd of most of its competition, with an almost entirely original soundtrack made up mostly of chiptunes by our fandom's Tumblr community (with one semi-notable exception). There's not rlly anything to complain about here unless you're overly picky about game soundtracks, in which case you can simply mute it via the options menu or something. Previous relses did have some missing audio files which caused the game to crash, but to the best of my knowledge the issues have been resolved in 1.0.3. Yay?


...Now that we're actually able to play the game, I get the impression that it's somewhat of a mixed bag. Sure, it looks and sounds grt, but as a game it tends to get old after a while. Most of the humour is rather stale as well, which is rlly unfortunate as it originally showed so much promise (although that could have been because the crtor threw all his best into the original demo and ran out of inspiration afterwards). Some people are still going to love this, as can be sily seen on Tumblr, and there's nothing wrong with that but in my opinion this is a prime example of style over substance. It may be worth a playthrough just to see the enemy designs and environments, but don't expect to get much for replay value out of Super Lesbian Horse RPG unless you miss the bonus boss or something.


I should also mention that I have stripped away the title of "strangest pony RPG", as Fnagame still deserves it for its hilariously counter-intuitive gimmick. Sorry, and enjoy your Christmas (although come to think of it this is a little late for that).