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

SKA is by far one of the best in it's genre.
Scenario, dialogues, setting is spot on. This is an intelligent game, from it's simple humor to it's excessively intricate game design.
One of the best RPGM with a progression both really free and also rewarding... up to a point.

Why did i withdraw a star if it is so perfect in every aspect ?
Because it's absurdly difficult. I played in Explorer mode to make it easy, and I ended up try hard every dungeon with sweat on my forehead...
Reaching the point to Richard's domain... I don't know if it is humanly possible to go through, but I had to resort to cheating, which I hate.
Even with cheats it was f$cking hard...
It did ruin my fun, a casual player like me but I couldn't let go... couldn't give up after 40hours of efforts, so I went through the end.

Which brings the second issue. It's overstretching. No matter how anything else is good, you don't want a story that never gives up. No mention of the friggin final boss rush... the epilogue... the repeated dialogues...
It seems the dev didn't want to end the game, and I respect that, but it's way too overstretched imo.

Other than that, a rare gem of a game, stupidly difficult, but hey, to each their kinks...

I'm torn with this one. It's not exactly average in terms of quality but the gameplay could be better. If I could give it a 3.5 rating, I'd do it.

So I enjoy the RPG elements in the fantasy world, the dialog with Aura and her inner thoughts are quite fun. The thing with the once per day collar removel is cool too.

There is a destinct lack of ugly characters. No diversity in that regard. (and I liked the old art more... maybe my taste is weird. New art looks too "clean".)
I also think it's a missed oportunity that the game gives you all kinds of interesting things to change in Aura's mind, but you essentially have to follow a liniar corruption path. The progress will always look the exact same every time you play anew, wich is such a shame for what I thought is a very unique feature.

Can't say I enjoy what is basically the second FMC Alicia much either. She has little interesting thoughts and just does whatever her master wants. (I don't like her design at all. All of her friends look 10x better/hotter)
Kind of sad too that the Male LI's are really really boring, at least to me. They just have no role hin the story, besides being an obstacle or anker for the Heroine. I guess I would have preferred playing as Aura's bf more than as her ? Giving him a bit more characterisation. The idea to play both sides could be intersting, but you never have any kind of moral struggle with corrupting Aura as Alicia.

As the game is right now, I don't think there is going to be an option to play as more assertive character. Aura could try to slowly undermine the Demons power in the fantasie world. I know she is gathering power and information slowly, I just think she could do much more.


I want a bit more game here, with less shattering my suspence of disbelieve.
Why not give the option to basically become the new ruler of the world at the end, outsmarting everyone ?
given that she is getting corrupted she could end up a more morally grey character, should she make certain choices.

Overall it's fine... for now it remains a bit of a too standard variation of a corruption game, for my taste. Everything that you think is here, is here lol.

Honestly one of my favorite games at this point, even including non-NSFW games. The slow burn and MC+NTR elements are exactly my type of thing, and I love how the sex stuff interacts with the actual gameplay. I am doing a Nightmare difficulty run right now, and it is absolutely brutal to try to play the "pure" route.

I will begin this review by stating that I am incredibly biased when it comes to this work, I first played this game almost four years ago when it had first come out and was pretty hooked on it early in the game, I loved the slow burn of the story and originally found the rpg elements quite neat.

My biggest love in this game however was at something that I think is sad we have to give praise for but that nonetheless deserves it, that of the creator being better than Aura herself and actually sticking with this project and consistently updating the project during its entire run until its eventual finish. That in what feels like an ocean of botched projects or works that seem to stall out and continue on with little to no purpose is amazing and should be commended no matter what we think of the finished work.

Game: 7/10

Whilst originally I found the rpg mechanics of Aura fun to play around with and enjoyed the general gameplay loop, this got a massive hit towards the end with the last dungeon crawl of the game.

The core loop of spawning each day with limited mana and hp and trying to use that to beat as many enemies as possible and strengthen yourself as much as possible is interesting and fun, finding what works against what enemies and what spells you wanna grab against what enemies made this even more interesting. Additionally the way it ties to the lewd system of the game is really fun, with how you can get ways to skip fights gain additional rewards by using these systems at the cost of "Corruption". I personally never got tired of this specific loop and enjoyed it heavily but will touch on it later.

However, Without spoilering too much the last part of the game is a party fight scenario, that in a game that you spent around 80% solo in was really annoying since it was a massive difficulty spike that seemed to work around the concept that you had actively worked with your party before. This made me thoroughly disslike the end of the game from a combat perspective as it felt all of a sudden very just grindy and annoying to deal with.

Story: 10/10

I am a sucker for female protagonist corruption games, theres nothing quite as fun to me as playing a character who slowly changes and begins to enjoy and revel in these changes, this is probably why I love this game. Seeing Aura go from righteous defender of all that is good and holy like some proper RPG Paladin (what with a stronger proclivity to violence) to something more of an opportunistic person whilst still witholding some of that important core identity was really fun and there are some smaller details in the story that I also really enjoyed SPOILER:


Lewd Content: 8/10

What can I say that I havent already said? The Corruption loop, great. The slow corruption, great. The one thing I can say is that there is sometimes a bit of lack in sex scenes and art. There is potential for more in so many areas and that kind of sadens me. I know the dev is working on future and new updates (something that is very cool seeing as he is also working on a new title at the same time). But still this was in my book a bit lacking.

Overall 9/10

I am biased, and I am tired. Might edit a finish later.

The slow burn of this game and the beauty and detail of the corruption is unbelievable. It just might be the best one ever written, at least in video game form. The gameplay is kinda rough without a guide, but not enough to bring down the rest of the game.

I'll start by saying I beat about 90% of the game. The start was really promising, the midway section where you unlock majority of the map and all the opportunities for the sexier content appear is a 5/5 god tier content, but then things just... plateau.
As soon as you've unlocked sex, everything stays vanilla and basic like that, no matter how many corruptions you unlock. Aura keeps progressing on her path to being a terrible human and bringing her friends down with her, but the actual sex throughout the remainder of the game (both in cg and in writing) is barely any different from what it was when she got her first few partners.

If the game had kept on ramping up on the depravity factor with further corruption this would be a 5* from me, but alas by the end I couldn't even bother to finish the story (which pretty well written mind you, but at the end of the day this is still just a porn game)... I realized I wasn't even looking forward to finding out what the remaining few sex scenes would be like (let's be real, they were probably roughly the same as all the ones before them).

Ps: By the way, there's wayyyyyy too much fighting for how little porn content the game has. There should've been a setting in story difficulty that just deletes all non-boss enemies from the map.

This is the perfect game for corruption enjoyers who want to see the fall of the protagonist over a long period of time. I like the dual worlds setting (real and fantasy) and how actions in one affect the other. The room with mental changes is a novel way of progressing the corruption of Aura.
Be warned this is an RPG game first. The majority of play time is grinding quests so patience is needed for the payoff.

Without a guide I got stuck multiple times playing on normal. I missed a lot of scenes. The new game + feature will help when I come back to finish the game later (for now I'm satisfied with the 1 ending)

Time played: 30hr with fast reading + occasional text skip for 1 corruption ending

Quite a robust collection of scenes, and a surprisingly engaging story.

This game was a rare NTR title where I was not frustrated with any of the characters in the way they acted, and was even able to feel some amount of sympathy for every party involved.

My two main gripes however, were the grind-heavy nature of the game, if you are to try and play it legitimately. Several story important fights seem beyond the player's ability without taking a large amount of time to build up your stats, or simply resorting to your Super Transformation (limited to once per day).
And secondly, the Reminiscence Room does not have a full unlock, even upon completing a full playthrough. While for other games this might be understandable, this one has a substantial play time, play that asks for a good amount of the player's attention, so this leads to wasted time on repeat playthroughs to see more possible scenes, more than anything.

My only other concerns are with plot points that were not tied up as neatly as I might have liked in the base game, namely the storyline of the Boyfriend's mother. I enjoyed the artwork and interactivity of this game enough to recommend, but I'd save yourself the effort of playing in anything but the easiest difficulty setting.

i'd give this a 4.5 star out of 5. it is probably the most detailed story i've ever seen. and the most amount of scenes. the story is interesting and there are novelty game mechanics that are well designed. overall the production value of this game is amongst the highest for RPGM type games. and amongst the best corruption type game ive seen.

it does have 2 major down sides that i have to deduct at least 1/2 a point. first is the pace is quite slow, but not repetitive. still, it took me at least 5 to 6 hrs of play time to get her corrupted. the 2nd downside is the story can get a bit long that i really have to use the skip feature a lot. also a minor downside is the game can get hard to follow and requires using a guide.

I finished my first run in 68 hours. i read everything, i talked to everyone several times (when have sense to do it), did all the secondary and still i didn't see the 100% of the game, and it's a good thing.

The choise really matter and have impact not just immediatly but for thing in next chapter too, the combat system and how acquire skills and upgrades are unique and very wonderful truly a game who is a breath of fresh air.

The story and the character are interesting, and the character interaction are wonderful, truly i think this is one of the few h-game i played who have very majestic non h-content on every aspect (storytelling, combact etc. etc.) and deserve to be praised for it.

H-content are very interesting and consistent in artstyle and timing, the character design and the h-scene are amazing and iconic. Some gameplay part are difficoult but it's fine for me having some good challenge sometimes, i enjoyed it.

Honestly i think this is the best h-game i played so far, i don't aim to obtain the 100% recollection room, but i obtained one "good ending" and thanks to another save the "bad ending", however when i will have time or when another update will be realesed i will want replay it again to try to obtain the "very good ending" and unluck some scene i missed if i coud do it without losing the prerequisites for the aimed ending.

This game is really a mesterpiece (imo it's the Baldur's Gate 3 of the indie h-games) and deserve the time investment to play and enjoy every aspect of it, i suggest to everyone to enjoy all part of this game and support the creator, i really have high expectation for future project :3

This is a very cool game. Unlike other games, the gameplay is very catchy and would work even without NSFW scenes. The music choice is absolutely incredible. Now I am at 26 hours and was doing mostly a corrupt run, I wanted to have some vice options, but it seems that I have to basically pick all the corruptions before I can advance further to unlock vice, I am not sure how is it possible from a developer perspective, but I would prefer to just pick what I wanted and go the way I prefer most games and that is like "paragade mass effect", major decisions do the good way, but the ones that don't really matter the bad, way. I am not sure (maybe I will find out later in the story) why it is necessary to completely tarnish my relationship with Rose in order to extort a little bit from the Farmer or steal the mana thing from the hermit. Or even mess up my school grades. Richard has great grades, and he is evil. Why can't Aura have great grades and be a little bit evil also? These things are not mutually exclusive. Also, Jacob's farm should be moved a little bit to the left/down. I ended up there way too many times by accident. Otherwise perfect game. The bossfights are interesting and there are always different ways to solve them. I especially like that some enemies will lose armor when you light up the fires because they hate light. Very cool mechanic.

This game without walkthrough is unplayable. A lot of content can be missed very easily, mechanics and progression are not clear and sudden difficulty spikes are too many. I dont understand why quests and enemies do not have recommended levels.

On the other hand the story is good, the corruption is excellent and presented in many subtle ways. I like how many themes are over the top in cartoonish ways.

What completely tanked the score from solid 3 to poor 2 is repetition and little quantity of CGs. What we got is good but its a tragedy that the main villain got 4 cgs and some of them get repeated like 3 times. Its simply unacceptable that we get so little art for so much grind.

This game is heavily marred by gating your progress through having enemies levelled in ways you cannot see. You find out by dying. You level up by walking from the shrine to the smithy to spend - one by one, and they then reset the day - items you find that raise your stats. Fights are regular and tedious. They are either easy because you meet the arbitrary level requirements, or they are not, and you do not know beforehand which is which. So you walk to the blacksmith, spend one thing, wake up in the real world, go to sleep in the real world, wake up back in the shrine, and repeat. Just unbelievably tedious.

I really enjoyed the story and h scenes a lot. The corruption was a nice slow burn. Combat was satisfying though it was crazy hard at times. I did not encounter much hscenes in my vanilla route though the conclusion is solid. For ntr, it is peak.

This is a great example of a game with a corruption fetish. SKA is a combination of two games: one is a full-fledged RPG, another - an erotic game. It’s up to you how you will play it.

Pros:

- Excellent plot, well-developed lore and game universe. Interesting mechanics (if you are prepared for the fact that battles are an integral part of the game).

- Diverse choices: quests can be completed in different ways with different dialogues. A huge amount of text - more than in some VNs. Writing is very good.

- Nice graphics and beautiful, catchy CGs. Not too many animations though.

- The main character, it’s difficult to remain indifferent to her. Other characters are pretty well-developed too.

- Pleasant music. My special thanks for the Winterfall’s theme.

Cons:

- At a certain point you get bored from battles and want to skip them as quickly as possible.

- The plot is presented unevenly. If we talk about events in the real world, the first half is just exposition and sluggish changes in MC. But in the second half the plot suddenly accelerates.

- Changes of the MC in the real world and in fantasy world of Roya are not synchronized. At some point, you begin to perceive these two MCs as different people.

- In general, the system of personality changes seems somewhat simplified: sometimes it lacks smoothness, and there is no possibility of resisting changes (for example, through choices in dialogues).

- Sometimes the narrative logic was violated. In particular, it concerns storylines in one of the epilogues.

Also, I personally don’t like extreme corruption with nasty events. The corruption path in this game has plenty of those. At some point it was really hard to endure MCs decisions and actions. Be ready for this (or get all scenes unlock and play the pure path).

Overall: 4,25/5 (but five stars, because why not). It’s a great game, and I hope that developers won’t leave SKA’s universe. It would be great to see a sequel with known characters.

To the developers

This game is a waste of my life.

Too little use of animations, even though the program used to create it is newer than other games.

The price is not worth the experience, not fun, only words, no care for the illustrations that make the player feel like they are really there.

Not fun. They pay to play the game for entertainment, not a game that instills bad things in the real world like people in the real world do, such as drug dealing, getting rich quick, etc. They come to play the game, they do not come to fight against bad things like in the real world. They want to be comfortable, to relax from the chaotic and stressful real world.

It took a lot of patience to learn many systems, but it makes the player feel more and more pressured by the rules of this game.

You go back to play the legendary game that uses RPG Maker 2000, created by the Japanese first. Hint: Red-haired girl with a ponytail, wearing a cheongsam.

It feels weird to give Star knightess Aura 4 stars when I played it so much and completed it but maybe that's part of the issue right there. This game's strengths are its commitment to its heavily corruption focused premise and how it weaves that into the story that takes place in both the real and the fantasy world. SKA pushes the theme of corruption to its limits by transforming the hero into more than a mindless slut, as is far too often the case, and instead twists her into someone truly evil. It is not afraid to lean into the over-the-top parts of the setting and that works really well for making the game's MC come across as likeable and earnest and the antagonist(s) as cartoonishly evil in a good way. I was surprised by how much care and effort went into the story of the fantasy world part of the game, expecting it to be a paint-by-numbers female hero gets raped into being a whore for cock but there is enough attention paid to the corruption parts of the game and to the characters that Aura spends time with to keep these parts of the game fresh and engaging. The dynamic between Aura and Luciela also makes the erotic parts of the game more enjoyable and picks up the slack for what could otherwise be fairly bland unanimated CGs.



What holds SKA back from being 5 stars is that the game is very overwhelming at the beginning and it is not intuitive at all if you are looking for the best items and gear. Without a walkthrough, there is no way for players to know which sex scenes will give them major stat debuffs, what skills they should be prioritising in the early game and this makes it worryingly easy for players to feel underpowered without knowing where they went wrong. Thankfully, there is an official wiki as well as fan-made walkthroughs to help first-time players but ideally these resources should be a lot more optional than they feel. The other big drawback is that many scenes lack imagination or just re-use CGs from previous scenes but as I mentioned already the writing is able to do most of the heavy lifting when this happens. My other nitpick would be that lengthy parts of the game discuss the MCs growing fascination with high heels but we never get to see her wear them, even though you would think that these sections would be ripe for feet and heels erotic content.



TLDR: SKA boasts surprisingly engaging story that combines well with interesting (albeit largely one-dimensional) characters and a detailed corruption system but is held back by an RPG system that probably takes up too much of the player's time and is not easily picked up by new players. Sex scenes could also do with more production value to really push the game to new heights.

Good gameplay, and nice distribution between the smut and the gameplay, not to much grind, a story that seems creative and inovative, this one is really good.
The game have few bugs compared to other games, it's well polished and I think the balancing of the player and the npcs in the fights are quite good.

v1.0.2
"Grind is not a bug. It's a feature!"-the game. Probably.

You know, the concept itself was really interesting: a slow but detailed corruption mechanic half and another half with your quality RPG Maker affair.
But god damn, the second part drags this game down so so much. And the worst thing: Both parts are intertwined. At the halfway mark corruption progress stops until you've caught up in the RPG half. If you've been playing like me, said "F RPGs I had my share. Give me corruption only!" then congratulations! You've basically build yourself into a wall and might as well start over doing both halves of the game simultaneously.

There is no progression here without also grinding the god-awful RPG elements of this game. And they are god-awful. Holy hell. This is a prime example of walkthroughitis where the dev never even realized that the way they've grown used to play (that is to say optimally with all the knowledge about when and what skills to prioritize, where to get the good loot and how to set themselves up) is an asinine expectation to have of your average player.
Wanna figure out where to go? Unsure if you can take an encounter? Unsure if you're even supposed to be here? This game's solution: Run into a wall, see if it sticks. It doesn't? Tough luck, run back where you died last time, brute force your way through by removing your collar - rinse and repeat. All this back and forth of dying 3 steps further down this stupid forest is just terrible game design.

I'm sure more advanced players that have adapted to this game's, let's call them idiosyncracies, will tell you otherwise with loads and loads of hints and a suggestion for a potential build. Like "Buy 3 ropes, learn flame and keep 6 MP handy. You'll need them to progress here". Yeah, good luck finding that one out by yourself.

You can play on the easiest difficulty and still have to engage your brain constantly just to survive encounters. So what you do is clear the map bit by bit while having to retrace your steps again and again. And the game is clearly designed to be this way. You'd think all those optional paths and possibilities of brute forcing encounters were a good thing. But no; this game lacks all the necessary convenience features and progression hints that could make such a system work. It just doesn't. You either spend a lot of time gathering all the items you MIGHT need whenever you enter a new area and prey to god that the encounter is survivable, or you bash your head against the wall until you're done.

The game also commits the cardinal sin of having a terrible leveling system. As in, there is none - at least not really. After hours of grind I had reached level 4. My party members were at level 3 and one at four.
What you're supposed to do to level is to battle monsters, collect random stuff and grind gold to then go to the local blacksmith and fuse that stuff into your equipment. On the way you'll check every nook and cranny - talk to each and every NPC in the hopes of finding someone that teaches you magic or skills. Which, of course, usually cost time bringing your entire gameflow to a grinding halt. Nevermind spawning in the middle of nowhere and having to run back to wherever you were interrupted last - but I think I've covered that enough by now.
You can get EXP through one-time quests or a laughably measly amount through certain day actions. But like so much in this game - it's tied to skipping to the next day. Like seriously - was wasting the player's time a requirement for this game? Is grind a feature, not a bug?

Some of the map design is just bad. It might look nice, but it plays terrible as it confounds the aforementioned issues of constant resets. There are so many corners and bottlenecks in a lot of these maps that movement never felt fluid. Places you want to go to do stuff are across half the map.
There is no indication of completed quest markers.
The game has a compendium of people, but if you're like me and at some point you just skip through the text, it is utterly useless. I gotta talk to John? Sure, I totally know who that is. And thanks for the picture! It's generic RPGMaker Dude #14! Thanks for telling me where to find him game!

I threw in the towel at the festival boss fight running straight into a wall a dozen times ON THE EASIEST DIFFICULTY WITH MYSELF IN SWEATY RPG HARDCORE GAMER MODE! And reloading the save I made an hour ago going through the same bearable RPG Maker gameplay just wasn't that appealing. To be fair about the area: The idea and concept behind the area was nice. But holy hell does it drag. And god forbid you're not prepared for what is to come - or know the perfect setup while also not having progressed so far into the corruption aspect that you've basically permanently debuffed yourself. Back to your save you made an hour ago. Isn't this fun?

There is story or worldbuilding here - be prepared to read novels worth of text. I couldn't be bothered at some point. At least the writing is good - there's just far too much of it. And it gets too wordy at some point. Well, basically everywhere. And just for the record - I hate the heroine. Smug self-righteous Mary Sue nerd. So at least corruption feels good. Just a shame that the villains are not much more likeable either. Or memorable.

This really hurts to say cuz the passion of the dev is clearly there, but they don't seem to understand the first thing about balancing, hassle free RPGMaker mechanics or how to implement QoL features. I'd advise anyone that respects their time to stay away.
I gave a very subjective 2 Star for how much this game let me down after having invested hours of thankless grind hoping to get on with the part I was interested in: the slow corruption. At least with games that are advertised to be without a soul you know what you get. Here, all you get after hours of grind is the creeping realization that you've built yourself into a corner 2 hours ago and might as well restart the game again. Easy mode certainly isn't going to help you.

One of the most overhype and shittiest hentai games in this website, barely any content early on and takes a lot of work to unlock the scenes, the art is nice but the game is so boring, is just text after text after text is more like reading a novel than anything substantial, there are better games like Karryn prison to name one.

what about the gameplay then? is any good? nope and to make matter worse you don't gain exp from monsters, I played for 3 hours and got a gameover and had to NEW GAME PLUS but nothing carries over unless you use your score points to give you some items or gold early on but since my score was slo low that didn't matter at all, is just terrible

All the 4 stars or 5 reviews must be trolling, if you want a good story othen play something else, why is the writing so important all of the sudden in a fucking Hentai game? like seriously hentai games the most important thing is the Hentai and this game does not deliver like at all, 4 HOURS 4 HOURS and I got nothing