Hello my name is Siderophilia and I have played Ashley the Pirate v.0.3.5.6 by YioruYioru.
Looking at the preview for this I for some reason expected a game with mediocre art which would make up for it with interesting writing, but what I received was something of the opposite nature. Playing this game I got the feeling that the author is clearly inspired by other female protag games, but simply fails to recreate the story which (in my opinion) actually makes those games interesting.
Starting off with the actual gameplay, it's pretty much a typical RPG with (quite a lot of) turn based battles. Fights are for the most part uninteresting. While the game actually employs a grid-based system which could be used for introducing some more interesting tactical aspects to the battles (e.g. abilities with different areas of effects or lines of fire that would actually force the player to think about how the characters are positioned and when to use different abilities) the absolute majority of the time zero use is actually made of that engine, so that it might as well have been scrapped entirely from the game with no loss. Simply consuming items between fights as spamming the base attack is all it ever takes to keep advancing, making combat feel like a slog.
The art is as I said the one thing that positively surprised me. While there is a certain lack of detail as seen in the preview pictures, the vast majority of sex scenes are actually animated with quite good fluidity, which by nature would be hard to combine with a highly detailed art style. Though nothing spectacular and the perspectives sometimes look at bit off, I also realize that animation is highly requested by a large player base and quite a challenge to include in any game. The main character's moans also add some sense of liveliness to the scenes and are probably the high point of an otherwise rather unremarkable sound design.
However as per usual good writing is probably what I think makes a game, and here it is sadly absent. While the game keeps record of Ashley's purity and sexual experiences, even to the degree that I believe every scene might have an alternative version pointing out if Ashley is a virgin at the time, the sense of actual corruption, that Ashley changes as a person due to her sexual experiences, or even that the sex has any impact at all, is absent from the game. All the characters (including Ashley) are very flat, devoid of emotions and motivations. Despite what I would assume should be an upbringing that places great importance on her purity, Ashley never really seems all that bothered by sexual harassment and it seemingly doesn't take much pressure for her to lose her way. Even what should be extreme scenarios such as losing her virginity to a rapist don't seem to have much of an impact. For such a scene, the dialogue mostly consists of moans and characters simply outright stating what we can already see is happening ("hoho I am taking your virginity"), and as it ends with the Ashley being brought back into town by some nondescript rescuer the event is never brought up again and it's back in the saddle. What the game really lacks is a good internal monologue. In an event such as the one just described the reader should probably be getting the sense that the main character devastated to be deflowered and shamefully doubting herself as she finds that her treacherous body begins to enjoy the act and embarrassment to be rescued in such a state. As of now there is none of that, we just watch an animation play out with some shallow writing mostly consisting of moans which we already have in the sound files. The facts such as that the main character starts out as a pure virgin and that the game has a purity stat seems to me like it implies that the developer set out to make a corruption game, but simply fails to grasp what makes corruption stories interesting.
In summary, gameplay grindy and uninteresting, writing disappointing, animations and sound kind of nice. None of the flaws are so big that they ruin the game entirely, but they make it far less interesting than it has potential to be. Feels like a 3/5