As stated earlier in previous reviews, the high rating is more due to the high potential of the game, rather than what it is at the moment.
I must admit, the author puts a lot of effort into this game and it is really noticeable, however, the game has a number of serious shortcomings, which unfortunately can hardly be fixed in any way. So let's go straight to them.
Negatives
The main basis of the plot is the corruption of the protagonist and her confrontation with the demon king and his right-hand Alicia, who directly brainwashes the protagonist. This is where the main problem lies. Alicia as well as the demon king Richard are the standard of cartoon villains. Their motivation is simple as hell, they do evil just because they can. And everyone else is just trash, unworthy as they see it. And while Richard gets the least attention in the story (which is odd, knowing that he is the archenemy here), his right-hand Alicia not only gets half of the playtime, but is also given the opportunity to play on her behalf and perform brainwashing manipulations. Based on my time with her, I can say that this is probably the worst antagonist I've ever seen. The author tries to show us that she is cunning and is able to calculate a lot beforehand, but from her worldview and all her monologues, she gives the opposite impression. She is essentially a teenage nihilist with an extremely primitive, if not moronic, view on the reality around her. In such stories, where there is a confrontation of several personalities and their views, the figure of the villain plays as much a crucial role as the figure of the protagonist. Take the Star Wars universe, which character comes to mind first? I can guess that it is very likely that you will name the Darth Vader. So if the villain figures are just pathetic, the work loses a lot of its value. Honestly, I had a hard time making myself keep reading Alicia's monologues, I wanted to grab my head and yell, "what the fuck are you talking about?" and then quit the game. Nevertheless, I made it to the second city and did a fair amount of brainwashing manipulation on the heroine to see where it goes. This is where the second significant problem comes in.
Manipulation of the heroine's mind, oddly enough, only affects the real world and has almost no effect in the fantasy world. Maybe this will change in the future, but it seems to me, that the changes that are already in the game should have their effect not only in the real world. Now about the nature of these changes. It may seem like matter of taste, but essentially we're turning the main character into a glamorous bimbo who can spend hours choosing a shitty pair of shoes, spending all her money on looks and gossiping about celebrity’s life. Honestly, this is not the kind of depravity you expect from a game of this genre, not to mention the fact that this kind of behavior is not give you sympathy to say the least. Nevertheless, if you start brainwashing her, be prepared to spend a good hour reading about shoes, fashion magazines, and other crap. Well, it's also notable that we turn the main character into a second Alicia, as she essentially rewrites her to suit herself. Here, it seems to me, the author has taken the wrong path for what the audience was expecting. The genres also include NTR, which suggests that the heroine will be cheating on her boyfriend. And here I think the game could have benefit from it, if focus of the game was set on heroine's sexual discoveries about herself, opening some dark desires such as cheating on her boyfriend. These things would have been much more interesting to look at. There could also have been an emphasis on rewriting heroine’s noble values into selfishness, desire for gain, mercilessness, which could have been reflected immediately in the fantasy world. Not only would it have turned the character from protagonist to villain more quickly, but it might have made her try much harder to prevent these changes. It would also reflect the protagonist's struggle with herself. The game already has willpower, but it has little effect on anything, but you could make thresholds at which the heroine could no longer make decisions as her old self, which would make it necessary to monitor this parameter more, otherwise people would start noticing that the hero does not behave as befitting a hero. And the funny part in it would be if at some point she will find it easier to achieve her goals if she use these foul methods. However, this is purely my vision. What we have now could also work, if the villain who makes this brainwashing would not be so disgusting.
The real world vs. the fantasy world. Here I have mixed feelings about the author's decisions. The main character, despite being intelligent, somehow fails to notice that the voice in her head in the fantasy world uses the same speech patterns (Phrases with 1000% as an example) as Alicia does in the real world. You could argue that if she revealed her true nature right away there would be no corruption, but I don't agree with that. She can't get rid of her influence anyway, and the changes that being made in her mind is hard to prevent. The main drawback here, in my opinion, is that there is no confrontation in the real world. The main character makes almost no attempts to figure out who stand behind this voice, there is no attempt to fight Richard in the real world, although we know that some powers from the fantasy world work in the real world as well. And the fact that, both sides essentially go to the same school and know about each other, but neither of them tries to use the powers for their own purposes raises questions. I realize this may sound cruel, but Richard and Alicia, could simply assemble a gang of thugs and kidnap Aura's friends to blackmail her or threaten to kill her boyfriend and then break her psyche as they wanted. But none of this happens and Aura, who pretending to be an ordinary schoolgirl doing nothing to keep herself and her friends safe.
Last but not least is the visual component of the game. It should be noted that this is my second playthrough of the game. The first time I ran the game over a year ago and encountered a huge amount of placeholders where art was supposed to be. I liked the intro and decided to give the game time to grow with visuals. Unfortunately, even now you can see that there is very little of it in the game. In fact, even the static figures of the main characters are always in the same pose, especially the figure of the protagonist, who always, under all conditions, holds her straightened palm at her hip, which after a while begins to seriously bore and hurt the immersion. As for the quality of the art and scenes themselves, there's one thing to say, it's not bad, but it's not good either. It doesn't have any flavor, it is quite simple in appearance and the problem more or less might not have been serious, considering the size of the game, if number of picture was at least 3 times more than what we have now. But alas it isn't, so I can't think of a reason why I'd want to wait another year to see the rest of the scenes in the game, which are currently without any visuals.
Positives.
As we are done with the flaws, now we can talk about the pros. The combat system and the rpg component. Despite there are people here who scolding the standard rpgm battle system, I have to disagree with them. It’s not that bad, and many devs, as well as this one, quite heavy modifying it. So If people don't like this system that much, they should block the tag combat in rpgm games and simply do not play them. So here, I will voice my opinion as a person who likes combat in games. The combat system in this game is not quite standard, it has a number of big changes and if you don’t grind money for upgrading your characteristics, you have to approach each battle with a certain tactic in mind. Also, everything is not just so simple, we get experience only for completing quests, rats don’t carry gold (Oh no!
) and enemies do not respawn. Here I will say my opinion, which may be very unpopular, but for me personally, this is what I always lacked in such games. I just love to wipe the entire location, so you can enjoy the work that you've done and don’t encounter them again to find that all your efforts were in vain and the enemies miraculously for no reason, revived to start bugging you again. It also opens up a wonderful thing like resource management. Enemies are limited, as are the loot on the map, which makes you plan your actions and how to spend your money. In addition, every 2 days your corruption is rising by 1 point and willpower falls, which negatively affects the stats of the heroine, so you have to think about your strategy. You can earase this effects, though, but keep in mind that resourses are limited, there is great demon invasion after all. So all these is very cool in my opinion. As for those who don’t like difficulties in such games there is a story mode, which you can choose at any time. I haven't tried it myself, but I think it's quite a solution of the problem.
The main character and the other characters except villains. I have to say that the main character and the villains who confront her are heaven and earth in comparison. Aura is written in dozens of times better than all the villains, she is much less suffer from clichés that we’ve seen so many times and generally has a lively mind, which allows her to well navigate in unfamiliar situations and find her way out of trouble. Despite that the heroine is not open to the world of sex, she is not clueless, as is usually the case in such games. Overall, she is not mentally retarded, but rather very intelligent, which is rare for games like this one. And only for that, I would give this game a bold plus. Overall almost all of the positive characters in this game are well written, they are interesting to watch. The main character's companions are also quite interesting, especially John, despite that he's an odd guy, but honestly, I'd rather watch him corrupt Aura in his own way than watch how the villains do it. Moreover, if it was one of the main corruption routes, it would have been much more original.
In conclusion, it is worth saying that this could have been a pretty good isekai, which, has good humor and mocking the genre's typical clichés, but many of the flaws I have listed become for me the stumbling block, which is why I probably will not wait for the next updates of this game. Lastly, I'll say for whom this game is for. If you came for the porn, you are likely leave disappointed. This game is first and foremost about the story and porn is secondary.
