RPGM - Completed - Star Knightess Aura [v1.2.1] [aura-dev]

This review is mostly about the JRPG gameplay, as that's the part of the game I actually experienced before I stopped. The sexual and corruption content, from what I've seen in this thread, is great, but I didn't have the patience to unlock much of it.

The gameplay is based on a pretty good idea: Normal combat encounters against regular monsters in most RPGs are not challenging by themselves; instead the challenge comes from the gradual depletion of your resources as you delve deeper into the dungeon. So what if we just focus in on that resource management and make the player character extremely weak, thus turning the combat system from a tactical challenge into a strategical puzzle of trying to figure out the most efficient way to use your resources?

Unfortunately, this idea is not executed very well.

Firstly, there is the reflex-based stealth system: If you sneak up behind an enemy sprite, you get a bonus round at the beginning of combat. If the enemies sneak up on you, they get a bonus round. But the enemy sprites move at lightning speed in complicated patterns. This, combined with how powerful this bonus round is, means that not having perfect reflexes all the time will completely mess up your plans for the day unless you save scum.

Secondly, the resource management combined with the open world is just too much. At any point in the game, I am left with a choice of either trying to make it through a difficult area at the cost of most of my resources or upgrading my stats and conserving my resources at the cost of ending the day, with absolutely no indication of which choice will be better in the long run. SKA and any game inspired by it would do well to rein in the player's freedom by (a) further limiting what areas can be explored and what quests can be done to keep the player from spending all their resources on a suicide mission and/or (b) having (some of) the player's consumables spoil between each day to clearly communicate how powerful the player is expected to be at the current point in the game and roughly how many consumables they should be using per day.

This game is very disappointing because it had the workings of something that could be good. But the sex scenes are rather meh, as well as the story. One of the two needs to be good. The ending on the good path was stock anime game good ending. Where everyone has to send their hope, and you won't back down yada yada yada. Also the reason why the bad guys where bad guys was dumb.

This is a porn game where developers set two whole worlds to serve a single purpose:” to corrupt the female main character---Aura. In the fantasy world where players can interact, almost all male NPCs who have a decent length of dialogue with Aura are set to corrupt her. Based on this fact, this game has three significant issues that prevent GENUINE players from rating it highly.



1. It is super grinding as a porn game; I have downloaded some saves, seen some players spend more than 110 hours on a single playthrough, while there are only 30ish sets of sex scenes in this game, each one of them has multiple variants, where devs only alter a few of the dialogues while using the exact same sex image. Therefore, you can see that, on average, you might need 4 hours to watch one of those highly repetitive scenes. And keep this in mind: you might need to wait a much longer time due to some vague and bizarre premises of those sex scenes that need to be triggered only by completing some eerie quests. For example, in one quest, you need to recruit some female NPCs, but you wouldn’t get a description of those female NPCs; you would have no choice but to interact with all female NPCs in that area. When you finally locate them, one female NPC will ask you to go to another location to find people for duels without a detailed description again, and you must interact with every NPC in the new location to locate the right ones. How long you spend on this quest depends on your luck---this is how your time is spent. Quests that consume an outrageous amount of time are everywhere in the game

2. twisted and problematic idea for female corruption pornography. This game contains numerous extreme contents that are severe enough to cause discomfort to many players—please refer to the countless previous posts. To many players, female corruption probably means the main character gets more sexy, less prudish, more sexually attracted and finally accepts a promiscuous sex life. But in this game, corruption will eventually turn a model student into a villain who bullies her old friends and force the poor girl to drink unrine from a toilet, sells her companion out as sex slave to others， distributes drugs, becomes a homewrecker to break a loving couple up on behalf of a lustful businessman who covets the wife, and even cheats on her boyfriend with the murderer who killed her boyfriend’s father and enslaves his mother! Her boyfriend is even forced to undergo a gender transition eventually. That content is depicted in detail. The twisted content like this fundamentally changes the nature of this game from porn to horror, or even worse. The content like this is no longer merely “sexual.” Many of them are inevitable; I can’t figure out why devs think content like this is necessary for this porn game. At the very least, developers need to warn players that the content might cause discomfort beyond pornography; however, there is no sign they will add the warning anytime soon, despite many players having tried to bring this issue to their attention for a long time. Instead of listening professionally, posts like this have been clamped down on by many professional posters in this thread.

3. It’s overcomplicated with an ancient engine where you can't even walk straight with the joystick. This game was developed using the 32-year-old RPG Maker engine, featuring eight perks, three progressing traits, seven types of magic, dozens of spells, two realities, one mental world, and numerous hiding and seeking elements in all kinds of mazes, as well as the facr perks, traits, and spells that serve as prerequisites for various quests. In some quests, you need to learn a particular spell. However, one must seek out the NPC who teaches it in the whole game world. This list can go on and on and on. If you really bother to spend weeks figuring out this overcomplicated mechanism for merely 30ish porn scenes that might cause you discomfort, this could be the game for you. If you decide to take the so-called pure path that is hyped in this thread by many “professionals”, then you would end up spending weeks for nothing, except more grinding. Don’t forget this is a porn game; you would miss 70% of the total meaningful content if you refuse any corruption in this game, including dialogues and mind manipulations. Even the devs of this game admit that the pure path is actually more challenging than the corruptive path, so the chance is pretty good that you would waste more time on the “pure path” for nothing in return.



Porn Quality:

As previously mentioned, the 30ish sets of porn are super repetitive. The changeable dialogues, besides the fixed pornographic graphics, are constantly between Aura and the other figure, who tries to corrupt her with a very bizarre reason --- she has nothing better to do, in my view. It’s quite like the little angel doll and demon doll arguing on your shoulder, and it consistently goes like:

Aura: No, I will never touch that cock!!!

Female Demon: But you can’t resist thinking of putting the veiny cock into your mouth, can you?

Aura: No, that’s not true!!!!!

Female Demon: Don’t lie to me, Aura. If you don’t want to lick it, then why is your pussy all wet?

Dialogue like this happens in every single set of sex scenes that only have one graphic.



Childish pornographic style:

The graphics are very cartoonish and childish; they are exactly a bunch of “paper dolls”; the graphics can’t render a sensual sense. Scenes are not hot by the graphics alone. In this game, pornography remains highly text-based.

Mono form of the porn genre

The theme of the porn genre is monotonous and tedious in this game; it is constantly mind-controlling, Sub/Dom forced sex. Predominantly, Aura has sex with others under the effect of either drug or spell, or both, against her will. If we took blackmail and financial hardship into consideration, it would make it clear that Aura is forced to participate in all the sex scenes.

Not be able to avoid certain upsetting content.

Many choices would grey out during the game due to the complicated mechanism. In such a situation, you could neither refuse nor leave, but only accept.



Story

The story is shallow and soulless, and it can’t resonate with players emotionally. But I am afraid it’s nothing we can improve here. The entire setting revolves around corrupting the main character. Every single man who has a decent length of dialogue will try to corrupt Aura to the corruptive path sexually. What kind of great story can we hope for exactly?

The character imaging job is horrible and repetitive: villains are evil for being evil, there is no logic for their actions at all, and the ugly and disgusting male NPCs are horny dogs who can’t contribute to the story except for spiking her into an unwilling sex.

This game contradicts itself. There's a lot of grinding involved. But the more days you play, the weaker you become due to the curse. The curse lowers your stats. Any complex action (like reading or an H-scene) ends the day.
This game is extremely unfriendly to exploration. The map is inaccessible, you can't simply visit towns; you unlock them by progressing through quests. You might also get side quests that require visiting a certain town, but you can't access it because the town is closed.

Besides, there are obstacles in the locations themselves. Is a plant or tree blocking your path? You can use a collar to destroy the obstacle, but only once per day. You can also burn the obstacle if you know the spell. But this is even more complicated. You can't simply learn the spell. First, you need to raise your magic skills. You need to read books. One book raises one skill and costs one day. If only it were that simple. Even if you level up your magic skills, you still won't be able to learn a fire spell, simply because it's not available for purchase. At least, I haven't found one in three hours of play. Speaking of skills, as far as I understand, they're leveled up by books, equipment upgrades, and sword upgrades. Stats are needed for skill checks to see if you can perform a certain action. For example, you need 13 dexterity to jump over a crack. But you remember that a curse lowers stats, right? Your hard-earned stats will be lowered by the curse, and you won't be able to make stat checks. So, not only can you not explore locations, but with each level of the curse, your situation will worsen. I don't think the developer knows what they're doing. I used a collar to jump over a crack and get to a chest. If I had enough dexterity, I could have jumped over it. And guess what? I'm stuck. Because I can't jump back, and the collar can only work once a day. It's just brilliant to officially add softlock to the game.

There's also the heroine's thought room, where "we" can gradually corrupt the heroine by flipping thought switches, deleting old thoughts, and so on. It seems simple: make the heroine more stupid, make her fight with her boyfriend, and so on. But no, you can't do it randomly. You have to do it the way the developer intended. So, you end up going into one of the rooms and clicking everything until you manage to click something.
The worst part of the game is the dialogue. It's pointless and there's too much of it. So much that I once spent a whole minute using the dialogue fast-forward button. If I hadn't pressed that button, I would have spent at least ten minutes reading those dialogues. It's just scribbling.
I can't say anything about the N-scenes. In three hours, I saw probably four easy and one medium-depravity game. This game clearly focuses on a different aspect.
I don't recommend it.

Great art and very nice corruption progress. Would be great if there was an option to skip the gameplay-heavy sequences when you want to make a new playthrough - a renpy edition would be amazing. The game is done but devs keep adding new content.

The game is so bad that it forced me to write this review. I expected it to be a typical game about the corruption of the main heroine, instead I got tons of cringe-worthy and sometimes meaningless text. The illustrations look fine, nothing special. The dialogues and the plot as a whole are very bad, I started skipping dialogues at the very beginning of the game, because otherwise I would have fallen asleep. The mechanics of corruption itself are stretched thin, and of course I understand that this is the main feature, but that doesn't make it good. You farm stats in order to read cringe text for an hour again, and maybe the main character will start saying the word cock instead of euphemisms. I've played for 11 hours and I've had enough, I'm exhausted. I really don't understand why there is so much text in the game (most likely to milk money from Patreon for longer), and I don't understand those who give this game more than 1 star. If it were possible to put a rating of 0 or even -5, I would do it.

Star Knightess Aura is one of the very best video games on this website and one of the best RPGs of the past few years period. As a porn game though? If you are playing this only to masturbate I'd suggest moving on or playing Dragon Conquista, another RPG with excellent gameplay and story but much more porn focused. The corruption is probably the best in the genre's history but it is SLOW. Like "it will be over 40 minutes before you even see a handjob" slow.

Where the game succeeds is in its tight and intricate gameplay design and in the unbelievably great writing and cast of characters. I haven't played an RPG with gameplay this challenging yet rewarding and balanced in years. You want to do every little thing you can possibly do to get stronger without progressing too much time. The proper way to play is to honestly attempt to delay the corruption of the character as much as possible, accept the H events that power you up when they show up but don't purposefully try to fill out the library in her head. And read EVERYTHING. This is not a game where you want to skip the dialogue, there's great and subtle writing here.

TL:FR: the game is one of the BEST of ALL TIME and you'll love it if you have enough time and patience to discover it. if you short on these 2 dont waste your internet for downloading this and look for something else

well the star knightess aura is quite an double edged game. some aspects of the game is waay better than other games even some AAA games but the game misses its point a bit IMO.

the game has one of the best character development that I've ever seen in ALL games that I've ever played (NSFW or SFW)

gameplay: 5/5
a classic RPG turn base combat with a few new mechanic that makes the fights feels unique. I wont give spoilers but the devs cooked for real on certain bosses.

world building. 4/5
even having a few words on about this subject is a massive feat compare to other games tbh and its great. characters, kingdoms, the powers we can use in the world etc. it all feels right.

characters: 5/5
all of them has their own weight even the most side piece in the story.

dialouges: 5/5
no need to explain *chef kisses*

erotic content: 2/5
well this one needs some explanation...

when it comes to corruption or brain washing, this game is sharing the top with karryn's prison.

with each dialouge you can literally see how things goes bad for aura. her transformation from a top student to a literall plain bitch(depends on your route) is quite a top notch and that adds more value on her erotic contents.

BUT ironicly, this part creates the only weak spot of this game.
Aura is quite a durable character and if you want to work on her corruption, you have to do things RIGHT..that cool

but because of that you have to wait soo long EVEN for the smallest NSFW content of her
most of erotic contents are put in mid-end/end parts of the game and considering how hard to go end game making these contents are unreachable for most of players for very loong time.

personally, I forgot this game has an erotic content until I come to the bridge event and OOOH boy it took quite a while.

A very polished experience, a good amount of content, nice to have a finished game in proper English, the level layouts were good, not overwhelming, it was quite rare that I was confused about what to do even when skipping some less interesting dialogue (unlike the gameplay which was hard as shit). Art was pretty good, but nothing to write home about.

The reason I'm ducking points is the railroading. It's so incredibly aggressive that it makes this game a VN in spite of its masquerading as a sandbox. Enemies don't respawn, so your XP is effectively capped.

Your gold is soft capped in the sense that money making events force you to end the day (AND OF COURSE IT HAS TIME LIMITS IN TERMS OF NUMBER OF DAYS).

But its biggest problem with railroading is the mind-chamber. It was such an interesting concept that made me quite excited to try this game when it was in much earlier development. Selectively corrupting the protag in a tailored way that interests you, or at least so it seemed.

Want to be an in-game-IRL whore with glasses? No can do. Want to be an in-game-IRL slut with good grades? Not happening. You cannot get past the first chamber without doing every single thing in it, all "options" are effectively mandatory if you want to play slutty/corrupted. Played the game for almost 20 hours into act two hoping that something would change, that it would make progression into the second mind chamber possible without having to take options I didn't want, but it never happened.

I see a lot of people complaining about it being grindy, but I'd argue it's just hard and long for little H payoff (time-wise). It's not like you have to go into dungeons and kill hundreds upon hundreds of enemies to get a decent enough level to compete in fights, no, you don't even have that option. There's a fixed number of enemies and resources (Who the heck puts a stock on shops in these games?). But it most certainly DEVOURS time if you want to do things well. You get plenty of character events for your time, but virtually no H stuff until act 2 or the second mind chamber (just some foreplay, not even oral)

If you're not in it for the sandbox or you like the particular kind of bimbofying corruption the game forces on you to progress sluttiness, you might love this game. If you were in it for vast customization options to tailor the character's journey and appearance to your liking, look elsewhere.

So i kinda stupid but this is the first time i use this web so lots of things i dont know but this game have version 1.1.3 right? So why in this web is tell it "completed" Can someone answer me?
I know this when i go to kemono and i know that this game still have a update

Game is just super boring, you know why we are all here, and its not for the insane amount of grinding i have to do to get to the actual content. 1:30 in and its just not worth continuing, even the full save gallery wasnt worth the time it took.

I like the whole corruption idea, but sadly mostly focused on bimbofication only. It could use more content too.
Gameplay is actually fun even though it's turn based rpg.
But still a great game and can only recommend it.

v1.1.1 horny chess

This game is a real outlier, and you shouldn't hold that against it.
The care put into the gameplay and world is remarkable. You can see the staggering level of polish and technical effort everywhere you look.

You won't beat even the first part on your first try. Start by just learning all the mechanics and developing a solid strategy. This game requires a lot of forward planning and managing multiple aspects at once. After all, your role in the game is to break the main character in the most insidious and gradual way, by worming your way inside their mind.
If the game feels too hard, it means you're missing something... The game can both reward you for saving or investing resources for the future and become more challenging if you miss opportunities.

Cons:
- It's a massive time-sink.

Annoyances:
- It can suddenly dump tons of text on you.
- You can't disable cutscenes you've already seen.

buddy we're here to play porn games, this game is sooo much grind for barely anything like ive played for ages and got nothing out of it. The game seems designed for you to get fucked and its genuinely such a slog that its making me annoyed.

Very mediocore game, not sure why all of the patreon memberships, but this isn't that much better than your typical RPGM game.

Art is meh, gameplay is meh, story is meh, just very average overall.

Also I really hate how all of the characters look the same, it really hurts immersion, its like they ARE the same character.

Play if you're bored.

I would say the dev doesn't understand gamers or just flat-out doesn't care about them. Why? Because it constantly punishes the player for exploring (sometimes permanently debuffing!), hence the gratification that is felt after the player explores tends to be heavily punished, not rewarded (a core aspect of any video game).

Good:
Probably the art style is the only thing that kept me going, which I would say is pretty neat and good.
Later on, the boss music got me slightly hooked.

Bad:
Everything else
But being more clear and concise:

- In terms of scenes, I don't believe it meets the expectations of these type of games with H in them. It feels weirdly paced and lack a lot more of content.

- The story isn't too bad, but eventually, probably has the biggest amount of not too interesting dialogues that you just plainly press ctrl for hours, yes, hours! Due to how difficult it gets to follow the narrative thread when it has a LOT of excessive growl sounds every 2-3 text boxes. You lose interest fast.

- Has a unique corruption mechanic where you also control an important antagonist and the main character. It gets absolutely tedious and more over-complicated than any system I've seen so far in any video game of my life.


Sincerely and respectfully, I would not recommend playing this game
It actually hurts sometimes

Put off by the terrible writing, walls-of-text and pacing.

Was looking forward to this, but the more I played it, the more annoying it got. Especially the pacing and writing - it's yet another story about a "demon king" and yet another H-RPG with god awful walls of text. Sadly, the build up leads to really mediocre gameplay.

Nice art, UI and overall design, but severely hampered by actual story. 6.5/10

One of my favorite games here. I like the idea behind the corruption system. How many ways there are to corrupt Aura in the dream world, as well as the slow burn. Sometimes a bit too slow but still ok.

STORY
Above average. Decent slow corruption. Definitely not the best, but I'd say it''s in the top 10% of the games I've played on this site.

CGs
Pretty good. The preview images are accurate. There is a decent variety of CGs, and the scenes are alright. Unfortunately if you aren't into bimbo-ification, you're out of luck. I really liked the nerdy/reserved Aura and wanted to see more corruption in this form. Still good though, just not 100% to my tastes.

GAMEPLAY
I genuinely hate the corruption mechanic - the dream/mental world where you have to solve absolutely terrible "puzzles" and interact with a bunch of stupid inane bullcrap in certain orders to get the corruption rolling.

I've played this game a few times, and literally every time I end up holding CTRL throughout all of the inane daily bullshit, ending the day, going to the mental block zone, interacting with EVERYTHING to see if I can get some event to progress, only to make 1/10th of the progress I need to see something new and worthwhile, This takes HOURS, especially if you aren't following a guide.

This is ridiculously frustrating and repetitive. Feels like awful padding. If not for this, I'd give the game a 4.5-5/5.

It's a good game with reasonably-good writing and gameplay; but some of the art/animations could have used another pass or two. The humor is surprisingly good, too.
It's better than most of the nearly-hentai anime in this genre.