This probably the best game I've found in this site. It's genuinely fun to play. Sure, as a sex game, the beggining is a very slow burn, but I was having fun just playing, so I didn't mind at all. For an indie game, it is pretty good. Sure, it's no Hollow Knight or Tunic, but not everyone can make games that actually rival in quality to AAA games.
Blazing Aries does a lot of things right:
- The combat is pretty fun and responsive (and it let's you configure the buttons in the controller, so you won't keep wasting food by trying to enter in the menu with the start button).
- The story is the usual "girl with misterious powers goes to an adventure to save the world", but I found Aries to be a fun character, willing to do the right thing, sure, but she is in for the adventure, not to be the HeroTM, and has a sassy side that I enjoy a lot.
- The side characters, even the rapey ones, usualy aren't as one dimensional as they usually are in these games. Many of them either aren't exactly rapey but spoilers make them do things, or they have some nuance (like the one that doesn't want to attack girls, no matter how much he wants, but is fine with tricking them). I just finished, after 6 hours, the first chapter of the game, and I found exactly one scumbag with zero redeaming qualities (well, technically four, but three of them were basically a joke, so I don't count them)
- There is a lot of effort in the game. Kuroto didn't need to put camera changes to show a full village, or make a new room so a character can stand against a door or wall that we usually wouldn't see, but they did. The game has a lot of little details that aren't needed but make the player smile because of the effort
- The FINAL fight of the chapter 1. Oh my god, that fight. The only complain I have about that fight is that it wasn't LONGER, because I was having a lot of fun. I'm not going to give more details because, frankly, it's better to find for yourselves, but it was a really fun battle, unlike any I've had at this point in the game.
- And well, the sex. I already said that Aries can be, sassy as fuck. Well, that includes when she is not being raped. Even as a (at that point) virgin with almost zero experience with sex, she is going to sass and fuck (pun not intended) with the one that asked for a fellatio to pay for some info, to give just one example. Is it the best sex I've seen in a game? No, at least not yet. But it was fun to read, and I usually skip the oral sex scenes because they tend to bore me.
For what I've read, Battle Princess Lacia is an even better version of Blazing Aries. If true, I really want for OTAKU to finish the translation already, because that's ONE game I want to play, seeing how good Blazing Aries already is.
Technically, this game wouldn't have 5 stars for me, it would be closer to 4.5, but because you can't give half stars, and other people already gave it a lesser score that I think it deserves, it gets the 5 from me.
Just one word of advice, this is a game WITH porn, not porn WITH gameplay, as many other h-games really are. And Blazing Aries can perfectly stand as a game, with no porn at all (it has a SFW option, after all).