The game follows the ever so delightful Vincent, who immediately establishes how much of a swell guy he is within the first minutes of the game. From his inner monologue, we discover that he's a mercenary who couldn't care less about anyone else. He also implies that he's done his fair share of raping and pillaging in his time. These are super endearing character traits for sure. Well by a stroke of amazing luck, our... 'hero' stumbles across a beautiful young woman being attacked by a group of bandits. Rather than jumping to her aid immediately, Vincent hides and watches the situation to see if it would be to his advantage to help at all. Just when the young girl is about to be raped, our hero leaps in tos ave her, kicking off a chain of events that will lead him to try and take over an entire kingdom.

As implied by the title alone, Conquering the Queen is not about telling a spectacular story and developing three dimensional characters. That's not to say the game isn't compelling in its own, depraved way. I often found myself playing just to see what ridiculously awful things Vincent would do in the name of sex and power. I'd argue that if you don't hate him within the first thirty minutes of the game, you're probably doing something wrong.

The female cast on the other hand is entirely forgettable. They exist entirely to be raped and turned into sex slaves, with each one encompassing a typical character trait. We've got tsunderes, tomboys, princesses and queens. Nothing you haven't seen before here. Their character designs are pleasant enough, if not inoffensively generic. Either way, they exist solely to have their minds broken by Vincent. 

While certain decisions you make during the game do effect which ending you get (there aren't a whole lot of options), fret not! Vincent will have sex with every single woman in the game, multiple times, regardless of the decisions you make. There is a lot of sex in this game. I can recall multiple points where sex sequences happened within five minutes of one another. Most sex scenes have only a couple of CGs accompanying them, but the game makes up for it through the frequency of the scenes. All the women are fully voiced. The music however is wholly generic. The best that can be said of it is that I barely noticed it most of the time.

It would be unforgivable if I neglected to mention the one element of the game that truly impressed me: the localization. As someone who played one of their early releases, Kira Kira, I can attest to the fact that Manga Gamer has come a long way. The game is not without the occasional typo, but they were few and far between enough for me to not notice all that often. I tip my hat to them for listening to their fan base and improving on areas that were less than great in previous releases. I was really pleased by how brisk, funny and generally strong the dialogue often was. There were evenings where I found myself moving forward in the game just to see what ridiculous thing would happen next. If Manga Gamer can bring this level of quality to every release from here on out, I'd be ecstatic. 

Conquering the Queen is good at being what it wants to be: a sex packed eroge with some verbose dialogue and an evil protagonist.The story is entertaining in a sort of "I want to see how this train wreck ends" way. The writing is clean and oftentimes verbose, while the female voice acting is solid. You're not going to be blown away by Conquering the Queen, but you could do worse if you're just looking for some porny, wish-fulfillment action with a little bit of personality. Plus, how often do you actually get to step into the shoes of a truly evil, intelligent main character? That's gotta count for something.

One warning though. Vincent does not treat the women he beds with any kind of respect. If that kind of thing understandably bothers you, I highly suggest you stay away. 

6.0 - Decent. Slightly above average, maybe a little niche. But you wouldn't recommend it to everybody.