Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together – Review

Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together is an adult RPG/visual novel, where you do bad things to fight against those worse than you. Living in a dystopian city where everything is controlled by an evil organization, you have to resort to some pretty evil things yourself…

Objectionable Adult Content

Let’s get this out the way first. Dohna Dohna has you kidnap women and force them into prostitution. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with that aspect of the game. With that said, while managing the business is a constant gameplay feature, most of the related H-scenes are optional. You need to fulfill certain gameplay conditions to trigger them. Some are pretty dark though. A mentally broken little girl looking for her daddy in a long line of customers, a sister whose brother visits her to take out his aggression, and more.

None of the above are from the point of view of the protagonist. While he’s certainly not innocent, it doesn’t explicitly show him with the ‘talent’ as Dohna Dohna calls them. It does refer to this happening in the story though, as part of their training.

Losing at certain points, waiting too long to rescue someone and similar may end up in members of your own team being raped by enemies. Again these can be mostly avoided for those who wish to, but it’s unlikely to completely avoid it.

On the less objectionable side, as you rack up ‘feeling points’, you can trigger more consensual adult scenes with your various team members. These include a variety of fetishes such as exhibitionism, bondage, blindfold play, and more. Triggering these scenes is an important part of strengthening the characters, so you’ll need to sleep with a lot of the women on your team to survive.

The 18+ scenes themselves are included without any patches required. They are censored with mosaics. I am playing the Johren version, which was the only version at the time of writing but it’s since been added to new platforms. Due to the forced prostitution concept, I do not expect a Steam release. Surprisingly, there’s actually an option to hide NSFW CGs or scenes though.

Asougi

Moving back onto the story, you play as ‘Kuma’, a student who has joined Nayuta – one of several anti-Asougi groups. Asougi controls everything in this city. It’s almost another country, separate from Japan. Most shops don’t even accept cash, only Asougi points. Everything in the media talks about and constantly praises Asougi and anyone criticizing them or even making minor mistakes get taken away and never seen again.

As we go further and further into the story, it reveals more about just how much they control and the measures they use. With talk of things like microchipping citizens, ‘cleaners’ who remove crime, and much worse, Dohna Dohna does a great job of making you feel that you are in the right to fight them, despite your own tactics. It really is a twisted society that they control in this city, but they present a great image to the outside of a clean city that helps the poor.

Nayuta

As you might expect of a ragtag group of rebels, Nayuta is filled with interesting characters. It starts with a team leader who shoves all the planning off on Kuma, a tiny woman who constantly makes sexual references (and is quick to follow through), a fellow student who is looking for fun, and a young man who is quick to anger. From there on, it expands a lot. Through the story, you meet a lot more people.

Most of the characters have their own reasons for fighting Asougi. With such a large cast, it doesn’t go into a huge amount of depth for each one, but they’re all reasonably well developed. This is quite a long game too, so there’s plenty of time to get to know them. Somehow despite their business, they come off as lovable. It helps that Kuma is shown to have moments of kindness occasionally.

One thing that Dohna Dohna does particularly well is the interactions between these characters. The humor is frequent and I was laughing through a lot of it. A lot of the jokes are sexual in nature, but some are just things like the leader ‘attacking’ Asougi by trying to eat too much at an all-you-can-eat restaurant to eat into their profits. It did well to lighten the tone and contrast the other scenes having some serious topics. The jokes even extend to the combat, with attacks like ‘butt-bumping’ someone.

Building Up

Overall the story is about Nayata’s fight with Asougi, but it introduces a lot more and does a great job at building the world. Other groups exist, who typically don’t get along despite their shared enemy. They’re all in the same business of ‘hustling’ women and rivals. Quite a few conflicts arise from this, even when they’re giving each other clues to move forward. As well as the other anti-Asougi group, there are outsiders with their own interests and Asougi themselves. The story often switches over to show their point of view.

Over time, I noticed that a lot of things are hinted at, but not explicitly said at first. This helped to keep me interested, wondering if something was going to happen.

I didn’t expect a whole lot from the story at first considering the premise, but it was surprisingly gripping after the initial setup. It built up into a satisfying ending too, which is followed by a very short epilogue focusing on one of the women.

Fighting On

Gameplay in Dohna Dohna is mostly around the circle of battling through stages, kidnapping women, and hustling them for money.

Each stage has a map with multiple options on which way you go. What’s ahead is only revealed after taking that path once, so there’s an exploration element. Some paths might be easier than others, with spaces ahead containing weaker enemies or items, while others might contain women to kidnap or strong enemies.

The combat is surprisingly in-depth. At first, it just seems like moving your characters back and forth to ensure you can hit the space an enemy is in from where you are – each attack has a set range. This can even be quite frustrating initially, since you may not have a character who can hit a certain space, but it opens up later on.

You can unlock multiple skills through leveling up and character events. With this, a special attack gauge, type advantages, passive abilities, buffs and debuffs, a wide variety of item effects, and more, there’s quite a bit to it. And you’ll need to understand it to defeat certain enemies. There are bosses that feel like sudden difficulty spikes, who you’ll only defeat if you can understand how to take advantage of these systems.

As part of this, you can kidnap ‘talent’ who appear in battles. As long as they’re the last to go down, you can use them.

With that said, and this isn’t limited just to battle; Dohna Dohna’s systems sometimes feel like they are working against you. Occasionally there have been times where I had to waste an item because there’s no skip and I can’t attack. I’ve killed ‘talent’ instead of kidnapping them since my range can’t hit the enemy behind them. It’s usually possible to work around, but not ideal.

Let’s Hustle

After kidnapping the women, you put them to work. Got to make that money to fight Asougi.

The talent all have three main stats, looks, technique, and mental. While there can be some variation, looks and mental typically go down as they work, while technique goes up. If mental goes down all of the way, they break and the money they earn is almost nothing.

At first, I tried to keep up the stats of my existing talent, but I found it near impossible. It was much easier to use them up until they break and then dump them to find more. In the late game, it became easier to keep the talent I had, but it still was a challenge.

Items were a big aspect. While talking to the talent can increase their stats randomly a little, using items could increase them far more. This was further buffed by a base upgrade system that increases the effect. There’s also the need to buy contraceptive pills to stop pregnancy, which wears them out.

The hustling itself is a game of matching talents to clients. Alongside their stats which have an effect are attributes like ‘flat’ which can affect the stats. Clients sometimes prefer talent with certain attributes. Some clients even pass along attributes, both positive and negative. This adds a layer of strategy to who to match, avoiding certain clients and sometimes even sacrificing a less valuable talent. Again, this was more interesting than I expected at first.

While not relevant from a gameplay view (aside from them tending to have high starting stats), some of the talents are unique and have the H-scenes mentioned above. As an added challenge to myself, I tried keeping all these without letting any break. Most talents are generic though.

Progressing

You can move at your own pace in Dohna Dohna – at least for the most part. Each day you can choose to hustle or hunt, the latter being both hunting for new talent or progressing through the stages for story reasons. Before the hustle or hunt decision, you can manage the talent, talk to one of your team members and visit the item shop. Some days are special too, being particularly good or bad for hustling, for kidnapping or for shopping.

I did sometimes find some time wasted here. I ended up going hunting the same levels over and over to find items I needed for hustling – mostly contraceptive pills. The item shop only lets you buy from a random selection and only one of each item, so both pills and anything to raise mental stats were always in short supply.

On a more positive note, Dohna Dohna always tells you what to do next. Sometimes it’s clearing a certain stage and sometimes it’s hustling with certain requirements. While not always the case, clearing stages could often be done at my own pace too. It’s possible to ‘scram’ and leave a level part way through, then return later.

There are in-game achievements to complete the game in a lower amount of days, but it seems that you can take as long as you like. You can always replay later with new game+ bonuses to try and beat it in a shorter time. I took 176 days and 33 hours on my first run, but I explored quite a lot of the optional content and it could be done faster.

Production Values

If we were judging solely by the art quality, Dohna Dohna would be a ten out of ten game. It’s amazing. While each scene only tends to have one CG with a couple of variations, there are a ton of them. Sprites have a lot of poses and customizations too. There are even occasional sprites for one-off scenes, such as characters in each other’s costumes or holding accessories.

There is one negative point though. When it comes to talent and clients, along with a few other bits, art is often reused. For example, when hustling there are competing talent. I sometimes found ones that looked exactly the same as mine competing against them. Having two clients with different names, but the same picture happened often too.

Apart from the protagonist, the characters are voiced. It’s an interesting set of characters and the voices chosen did a good job at presenting them. The music fits well, but aside from a handful of tracks, I didn’t feel that it stood out.

Verdict

I went into Dohna Dohna ~ Let’s Do Bad Things Together with some skepticism. I’d mostly heard about the adult scenes including forced prostitution and rape, which isn’t my type of content. Alongside that though, I found a genuinely interesting story with fun characters, surprisingly great gameplay, and amazing art. There are certainly a few issues that bring it down, but I enjoyed it a lot more than expected. As long as you know what you’re heading into and aren’t put off by those aspects, it’s one to play.

DOHNA DOHNA ~ LET’S DO BAD THINGS TOGETHER IS RECOMMENDED

If you are looking for another more comedic visual novel with lighter content, perhaps Sankaku Renai or the more recent Harem Kingdom would be worth checking out. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.

Many thanks go to the publisher Shiravune for a review code for this title.