RPGM - Completed - Engraved Pleasure [v1.11] [Kotori no Aori]

The emotional response that an NTR story evokes should be the result of the NTR, not from how poorly the NTR is written. With NTR games they can't just have cheating in order for them to be good, they have to create the atmosphere that goes along with it. They have to evoke that emotional push and pull that defines the genre. For note, Robert is the MC, Arieno is the FemC, and Raymond is the antagonist. This review contains spoilers.

For NTR stories you almost always have to suspend your disbelief to a decent degree, however sometimes the ridiculousness of a story becomes too much and you simply can't do that anymore. That's what happens with this game. The sheer amount of illogical and brain-dead storytelling and actions that goes on is too much to ignore. Not only that, but any "character progress" is irrelevant for 80% of the game.

All that considered, the primary issues with the game falls entirely on how Robert and Arieno are written and involved in the story.

Robert's issue is with his hopeless obliviousness, failure to act, and major lack of involvement in the NTR aspect of the story. There are times where Arieno and Raymond fuck in front of Robert's eyes and he still has doubt on if they're fucking, it's that bad. It isn't until you're about 8 scenes from the finale that Robert starts lends credence to the idea that they're fucking behind his back and it isn't until scene 32/35 that he sees them "in the act" without obstruction (I don't mean fucking, just them kissing). Then, what really drives this issue home is that Robert won't actually act on anything. He's a genuine spineless bitch despite his character having being established as not being such. Because of all this, the game doesn't properly properly establish the emotional aspect of NTR from the loser's perspective. Robert is just there to drive the main story forward while Arieno and Raymond are there to drive the NTR story, and proper crossovers are rarely established. Since this game is from the POV of the male being NTR'd and has such a small scope and cast, he needs to be heavily involved in the NTR story. Not just 5 hours of thinking "are they fucking!?"

Arieno's issue is with her corruption and outward depiction. Corruption in NTR games has three important aspects: corruption of the body, sexuality, and emotions. Arieno's body was corrupted 2 years before the story and her sexuality is corrupted within the first two sex scenes. The issue with this is that it's appropriate from a story perspective but since we, the player, don't see much of it or get to experience it in full it falls flat. The remaining 90% of the game covers the emotional corruption, but unfortunately, despite becoming Raymond's cock sleeve, she emotionally remains loyal to Robert for almost the entire game. She barely corrupts over time. Even with that, when she does slip into sexual depravity not only does she not show any signs of it to Robert (aside from returning to calling him "His Highness"), robbing us of that emotional pull, but after her h-scenes ends she slips back into having not fallen for Raymond. The game milks the "final fall" scene for 20+ scenes, making the h-scenes feel detached from the main story and stopping any and all progress. Also, to make it clear, "she's hiding her true nature" is not an excuse for showing zero character change.

On top of all this, reading the premise of a story should never be more interesting than experiencing the story, and unfortunately that happens here. The game also fails to build the emotional connection between MC and FemC and keep that going throughout the game. What irks me the most about this game though is that it's not bad enough for me to drop, but it just isn't good. It has a significant amount of almost great things, but they all come with a negative parallel. The game is a 2/5, with a better execution this could've easily been a 5/5. I don't even know if I can recommend this game for the porn, because while the quality is fantastic the quantity is severely lacking. It kind of pisses me off.

The only good part about this is probably the art (which there isn't a lot of) and the mid-battle harassment. The plot is pretty mediocre and the pacing is a little off but it is a little bit of a slow burn for Arieno's downfall until it drastically speeds up towards the end. It has sex sfx and moaning.

A true average.

While it goes out of its way not to fall into the trope of the girl becoming a neighbourhood slut (instead we only get one dude NTRing her), it doesn't do anything new and exciting.

That is not to say the game is bad, but it is truly the average of all worlds - somehow good enough not for me to drop it, but not good enough not to feel like I'm wasting my time with this while I could be playing something better.

I think my main problem is that in a game that already has limited its scope to one (real) antagonist, the girl already has a corrupted body before even starting this, thus leaving only the corruption of the emotions. Not bad per se, but everything felt a little bit lacking in substance.

After reading the description of the game, I was anticipating a new take on NTR, involving uncovering details about the heroine's lewd past. However, it's not quite like that; you only witness three scenes from the past, all thematically similar.

The game itself is your typical clueless boy vs sex god NTR, and even that isn't done all that great.
Story is ok-ish, but with a few plot holes.

Considering these shortcomings, I would rate it a 2-star; however, I won't deny that objectively, the game exhibits good quality and interesting mechanics. Therefore, I'll give it a 3-star.

Overall, it was an immense disappointment.

It's a really solid NTR game with a lot of pluses for me. I just finished it and will review while the details are fresh, so these are the things that stood out for me;

I feel like this is weirdly close to 5 stars, despite the 3 stars I'm giving it.

The art and story are all fairly solid. The 2 main issues are:

1. the all-to-common "let's just pad this railroad story out with some generic RPG stuff" which manages alright given the premise of the game and what most people are probably playing it for, but it still is just kinda annoying and gets particularly egregious when, for the sake of the story "keeping MC in the dark" MC can walk in on the girl tits covered in cum laying in the other guy's bed with him and it be waved off as "oh this? just lotion for a massage, nbd" and not even bat an eye.

2. while they spice up a fair bit of the RPG battles with some unique battle-fuck mechanics, it also serves to highlight the lack of any real agency you, as the player, have in this game. Big missed opportunity to add some tangible measure of corruption degree or MC's awareness of what's going on.

While both of these are things that would've required a large amount of dev and writing effort to really polish up, they would've quickly transformed the game from a "3 stars you should check out" to an easy 4 or 5 stars you've gotta see.

alver all this is a very rpgm game with NTR plot , the male MC is a bit clueless not stupid or mentally cuckhold at all and there are no ugly baster , game play quite easy and only time you get in turn base combat is boss per level , other than that is hit and run
there some inconvenience in game such like you have to run back on foward in mission objective and go back in the room to view the screen

Extremely mediocre. The game has some cool ideas but they are poorly executed. Also the character is an oblivious idiot like in most of these games which really ruins something that could have been a good story.

It has a bunch of events to discover and that's nice, but you only see them trough the gallery which is such a let down. In fight "events" could be nice but they are way to repetitive.

What I enjoyed in the game was: A) The story did not have another demon king! It was sympathetic with an interesting world that used Greek mythology words adapted to its setting. B) The CG and scenes were clean and well-made. The game tried to connect the “corruption” theme with the heroine’s actions in a realistic way. The best part that I liked and why I consider it a hidden gem is that it had a nice flow between corruption and lust without falling into "lost to the dick"trope.C)It has the right light not too big not to small.What not to love from the above?
The minus of the game was to many item without any use..It could have less fights but that's to me.I would put it around 4,5. 4,3 stars but lets give it Five stars,it was an honest game

This game is rough and the reviews will be polarizing I'm sure of it.

It is definitely not a 4.5/5 where it currently stands, so I give this review a 3/5 though the game probably is closer to a 3.5/5. The takeaway is that this is a very skippable game but if you have nothing else to consume, it's passable.

The NTR, premise, and art are interesting to hook you in. However, there isn't bite once you do invest 5-10 hours reading and playing. The premise of the story is sexier than actually reading the story, which is filled with junk, filler, and boring progression. The plot twists are obvious and... they kind of spoil themselves in uninteresting ways during gameplay, without the NTR tension. It's simply not worth wading through the garbage of random encounters, leveling up boring stats, and the routine of waking up going to sleep over and over again in the game.

My hope would be for someone to take the idea of this story and write a better execution of it. That would truly deserve a 4.5/5 or 5/5.

As a H game, i give it 6/10. Decent artist with decent CG, nothing special but nothing bad either.

As a Drama though, i trust it derserved a solid 8/10 maybe even 9/10. Good writting and well excute happy ending.

Essentially what Botaniq says in his review is true. The story is a complete nothingburger, the sprites for the characters are nice but the actual sex CGs are kinda bad, all the sex is extremely vanilla, MC is brain-dead, the battle fuck CGs are terrible and have extremely little variation until the very end of the game, the list goes on.

The hidden NTR aspect isn't great either because there are no sprites of the girl looking disheveled, cum on her face gets used maybe one or two times at most, and you get essentially nothing but see numbers go up at night.

Overall just a very boring and middling NTR game. If you absolutely must try this game for whatever reason, just play on easy and set Raymond's fondling to max rate for the boss fights.

The game is very similar to the other dozens of other NTR games where the combat system is irrelevant and the MC is completely clueless throughout the corruption process. However, the transition of the story and the pace of the corruption is smooth so it's a fairly easy game to play through without much grinding. Overall, a solid NTR game if you like this genre.

This title looked good at the begining but for me it was a wrong impression

Through the entire game you will watch a mc girl having vanilla and incredibly boring sex with a typical "steal your girlfriend" guy (and only with him). They literally have like 40+ scenes and they are mostly the same

Art is mediocre, scenes are repetetive, not animated and have tons of text

The only characters who have portraits in the game are the 3 main characters

Battle scenes happen completely out of context (like when you are fighting some supposedly strong boss monster), and have zero impact on the battles or the game

Wish there were more games like this.. RPGM male protagonist, netorare, battlefuck mechanics.. there's only a handful of games that matches this criteria. That said, this game is one of the only RPGMs that I actually started and finished in a long time. The story was great. I kept wanting to see what's going to happen next. It started out as your typical blackmail NTR but the way it progressed was just way more believable that most other games of that genre. You play through the eyes of the MC and you can only see what happens to the LI in the recollection rm(which you can also unlock from the start if you want), so you have a choice to view what happens with them or you can just progress through the story and leave it all a mystery as you watch their actions and chemistry change around you. I also liked the notifications pop-ups showing what happened to the LI through-out the days and nights when you're not together. I only wish the cut-ins during battle progressed further and were more lengthier. It's just funny, their lust gets to the point where they don't even care if the MC is there or not. Fun game, more of this please!

Great game for its genre. The art is great and doesn't take a lot of short cuts. The story builds slowly and believably. I really like the mystery component of not knowing what happened to her in the past. There is a lot of quality of life features (easy mode, quest tracking) and the translation is good too.

There's no reason not to play this if you like NTR.