How all the tattoos and piercings give Ashley any additional depth or cause her to act differently? The answer is, they don't.
Did you read all my posts before you responded to me? Or just my first one?Because in second post, responding to Brickfan, I actually adressed this very point:
I recognize that this is a lot of work. However, I think one thing that could be done to reduce the amount of work is to, paradoxically, reduce customisation a bit in favor of story-based "packaging" of change. What I mean by that is that changes should be tied to routes, rather than offer you a direct choice. So, for example, if you go with route 1, then Holly WILL get her tongue pierced and cut her hair short. If you go with route 2, Holly WILL keep her hair long but untie it and remove her sweater, etc. But you can't get long hair with pierced tongue. No more going to the shop and choosing each tattoo/piercing individually. You'd still get a choice, but the choice would be about story direction, and not individual modification. A good example of what I'm talking about is Bimbo Ash route - the moment you choose "Adopt a new identity," you are locked into blonde hair and bigger lips. You cannot have blonde hair with natural lips, or fake lips with red hair. And you can't have blonde hair or fake lips without big boobs. Doing that across the board would reduce the number of minor variation EvaKiss needs to think about considerably. I'm fine with sacrificing some fine-tuning in exchange for more numerous and more extensive transformation.
TL/DR - yes, I agree that the individual piercing/tattoo choices lacked substance in GGGB, which is why I am advocating for bigger package of transformations tied to story events. And tthe more advanced one goes on a path, the more extensive the transformation should be.
Question. Why do you assume that Our Red String is a corruption game? Just because it's the same creator?
Because Eva_Kiss has said this game will be in the same genre as GGGB. Because while Eva-Kiss has mentionned in her Patreon FAQ that she would ultimately love to do an actual professional, non-erotic fantasy RPG, à la Bioware, right now she is making erotic games with great stories. Finally, did you read the description of Holly posted a couple of pages ago. Eva says this in it:
To which end will Lena lean to, Ivy or Holly? Or maybe she will help Holly blossom? Or maybe lead her down the rabbit hole...?
If that does not scream corruption of one type or another to you, then Idon't knowo what to tell you.
ORS is a corruption game, like GGGB was. It's trying to do other things beside corruption, and I am all in for that, but there will be corruption paths, not only because her patrons like it, but because Eva also like it. Which leads me to this:
Only breast enhancement causes her to act a bit differently, though I feel that change is weird and is not justified. Bigger boobs don't turn a smart girl into a stupid one. Most of the stuff was written just to have it in there, with little care to make it click with the rest of the writing. It's actually obvious where EvaKiss felt passionate about writing some stuff, and where she sort of lazily put something that her patrons demanded.
If you are implying that the bimbo route was there only because her patrons demanded it, then you are wrong. A long while ago, beofre Ashley had become blonde in the game, EvaKiss released her first concept for Ashley (a brunette) to higher tier patrons and the final stage of her transformation gave her platinum hair and bigger boobs. That was planned from day one.
Except there's one thing...we don't play as God.
We kinda do, though. Yes, the narration is first person, but the game isn't. We are still outside observer, looking on the action from above. We see Ashley in a way she could not see herself, and we make the choices from that perspective. This is even more true in ORS, where we will be able to make choice based on more info than either Ian or Lena has individually.
It means that the rest of the characters need to be consistent and only change according to the protagonist's actions. Ashley has nothing to do with Eva turning into a gangster slut, she kind of does this on her own volition, which means that's who she really is, that's what her personality is, and thus she shouldn't act judgemental and holier-than-though in a different route unless she's bipolar.
I really do not see what is so implausible to you here. Eva has the potential to let her sexual urges rampant and listen only to them, but she also has the potential to repress and control them and take a negative view of them. Which way she goes depends on environmental stimuli. The way you are talking, wether you are a "slut" or a "prude" is written in your DNA, you are predetermined to be either one or the other. That's not how this works. Drop the madonna/whore complex - humans are more complicated than that.
(Also, bipolarity and multiple personality disorder are different things)
The original comic books were written as light-hearted colorful short stories for kids. Therefore all the colorful silly costumes and funny superhero names. They changed a lot and evolved, became more serious but it's beside the point. Originally they needed to grab children's attention with the colorful drawings first.
Cue The Last Jedi "Every single word you said is wrong" Luke Skywalker meme here because, damn do you not know what you are talking about. I am not going to derail this thread by giving you a crash course on comics as a medium, as tempted as I am to do so, but a couple of points:
1) Superheroes are not the only, nor even the first, genre of comic book stories to exist. There are comic stories in every genre, all over the world. The suggestion I made, Sunstone, is not superhero at all (though its creator soemtimes write or draw superheroes as well).
2) Even if we stick to superheroes, what you describe is an extremely over-simplified an condescending version of Golden Age comics. Yes, they were written to be accessible to kids, but they weren't intended just for them - they were intended as four-quadrants fare. Hence why Superman second story ever was all about how American weapon merchants who fomented wars in South America so they could sell ammo and weapons to both side were evil scum. Or why Jack Kirby and Joe Simmons created Captain America explicitly as a political tract whose message was "Nazis suck, and America should go fight them" - something that earned them death treaths from the New York Bundt. Or why Look magazine - not a kids magazine by any mean - comissioned a short story in which Superman ends World War II by taking Hitler and Stalin to the League of NAtions to be judged. A story that pissed off the Nazis so much they actually wrote about it in the official SS journal.