Issue #6: Intro to CYOA
Touch fluffy tails!
Hello everyone! Happy July June! Sorry for the issue being a bit late, but hopefully I can make it up to you with some kitsune titties. And succubi. Lots of those this issue.
So let’s get to it!
Time to pick up what we started in the first few issues with another “introduction” article. This time it’s a quick intro to CYOAs for the unfamiliar.
CYOA stands for Choose Your Own Adventure, and typically can refer to one of two very different things.
The more ‘traditional’ use of the term refers to “interactive fiction” with branching paths and multiple endings. Originally this would take the form of a book with instructions like “If the protagonist takes the door on the left, go to page 22, if they take the door on the right go to page 67,” while more modern examples of the formula can use webpages with links or a straight up visual novel style video game. You can read some spicy ones for free online on Chyoo, though be warned that many of them are incomplete and have dead ends.
One twist on the “interactive story” formula of a CYOA is what is often called a Quest online, where instead of an entire story with multiple endings already being written, the author writes one chapter of a story at a time, allowing the readers to have input between each chapter and *vote* on what will happen in the next chapter. Questionable Questing is a forum dedicated to those.
The second type of “CYOA” is usually comes in the format of an easily shared chart with a really complicated “would you rather” scenario on it. Usually it’s just for fun, to give you a bit of food for thought to kickstart some daydreams or so that people can post them in online communities and debate the pros and cons of different builds, but sometimes they can be used like writers’ tools to generate characters for stories and things like that.
Anyway since I can’t post outright porn on substack I’m limited in terms of what erotic CYOAs I can post directly, but here’s a couple spicy examples.
And head’s up, the intro and instructions for the next one are in the *center* of the image so read that blue box fist.
They can get a lot longer and more complicated than this though. Like the nearly 30 page long Love Azazoth scenario, or Abyss Diver, which is pretty much a full game in it’s own right. As they get longer and more complicated, some creators have taken to making interactive versions where you can click your choices and then the program tracks your point and combo bonuses and such. This also makes it easier for them to have hidden choices and other secrets. For a couple examples of *those* you might check out Forbidden Caravan and Serving Humanity.
It’s not like they *have* to be porny. SFW Cyoas are probably more common actually. Build a Dream Home or Go On A Spooky Road Trip. Many of them (both the SFW and NSFW ones) were originally made and posted on 4chan, which is a little hard for beginners to navigate due to the lack of permanent posts, so probably the most beginner friendly place to find more CYOAs is reddit. r/makeyourchoice for SFW ones and r/nsfwcyoa for the spicy ones.
What does all this have to do with monstergirls? Eh, in general, not much. But sometimes I might stumble into a pretty good monstergirl-related CYOA of either type and might take the opportunity to recommend it here. So figured I should start with a quick crash course.
The featured game this month is Succubus Academia, which just recently released it’s DLC Expansion in English, meaning you can now play both that and the base game with a professional quality official English translation!
Anyway, it’s a bit of an odd game. The sex is oddly vanilla (none of these girls even do anal!) but at the same time focus pretty heavily on the death/snuff/horror aspect of succubi killing their victims.
The goal of the game is NOT to defeat the succubi, because that’s impossible, but to make the inevitable demise of your doomed parade of player characters as entertaining to the succubi as possible so that they become satisfied enough to go home instead of continuing their rampage. To that end, your skills in battle aren’t to attack but to… Cry and beg for your life so the succubi can get off on your tears? Well, that’s one of your skill tree paths anyway. Despite that weird layer of window dressing, it’s a pretty standard turn-based RPG kind of battle system revolving around setting up buffs/debuffs and skill combos.
Standard enemies use still pictures and bosses have animated scenes (though the loops don’t change much even when using special skills) but overall, the presentation is very well done.
The game (and the DLC!) are available in English on DLsite.
Speaking of schoolgirl succubi; Scudbutt purchased twitter blue just so that he could post the full version of his Meru the succubus OVA on Twitter. Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain. You can watch it here.
Instead of spinning one of my own tracks this month I’ll ask you to listen to this instead, as it’s pretty on-point for this month’s cover art.
Touch Fluffy Tail by Ken Ashcorp is a meme-tastic banger of a song inspired by Monster Girl Quest. (Refer all the way back to our first issue for an intro to MGQ) After clearing part one of the game, you too, shall get the reference.
This month’s coverart and pinup are by Hard Koba
Last month I pointed out the extreme difficulty of pulling off monstergirl cosplays, but funnily enough I’ve recently discovered My Pet Monstergirl, a project by a bodypaint artist to produce lewd photoshoots of women with some elaborate body-paint based cosplay. A lot of the content is locked to Onlyfans and similar platforms, but I can share a few sample from their twitter:
Cobatsart draws characters with a pretty wide variety bodytypes, with a pretty strong thread of story/character progression. He’s got several monstergirl OCs (A couple of which are pictured above) and frequently draws fanart of characters like Midna and Tron Bonne. I know Tron isn’t a monstergirl but we still rep Megaman in this house, dammit!