Star Knightess Aura

Unironically one of the best games I've played in recent memory. The devs COOKED on this one.
PSA: This is a censored version of the game, but it can be patched.
TL;DR
Great:
- Very engaging story with several great twists throughout
- Parallel narratives of the real world and the fantasy world, Roya, work together very well
- Well-written characters with believable values, goals, and motivations
- Challenging but enjoyable combat and resource management
- Very well-done weaving of the corruption mechanics into the gameplay and the story in meaningful ways
- Playing as both the hero and a major antagonist is a fun twist on the typical corruption storyline
- There's a lot of content here. Completing one playthrough took me 60+ hours
Neutral:
- NTR. It's in neutral because it's well-done, and that's coming from someone who usually isn't a fan of it but will tolerate it if the rest of the media is good enough to justify it. If you hate NTR, avoid the corruption route at all costs. It gets brutal especially if you empathize with Aura's boyfriend George like I did :')
- It's very difficult to do a pure run your first go-around. In games like these I usually prefer the pure route first, but that was extremely difficult here and I gave up
Not Great:
- There isn't a ton of H-content, and what's there is mostly just alright. There's a lot of repeated art and scenes, and there are no real animations either
- Achievements are very difficult to unlock without spending an obscene number of hours doing multiple runs or doing some very tight planning
If you need more convincing...
With this being an RPG Maker game, it might be easy to sell it short. There are so many low-effort RPG Maker games out there, especially H-games, and on top of it, this has what seems like a pretty standard corruption narrative at first glance. More often than not, corruption is slapped on just to be a counter of how many times your character did the nasty, and then oops, you did the nasty too much. Bad end for you :) Star Knightess Aura's corruption system is far more interesting, and it blew away all of my expectations. I originally played it through 'alternative' means but enjoyed it so much that I bought it on Steam to support the devs, hence the low hours despite the 60+ hours to finish my playthrough.
The gameplay itself is mostly pretty standard RPG stuff, and the story starts off seeming like a pretty typical isekai. Even Aura, a huge isekai nerd herself, is very excited to be the main character in one and get to experience all her favorite tropes, including her mega-overpowered Star Knightess transformation. Things don't go so well for her. Without going into too many spoilers, her transformation becomes locked behind a curse, and you can only use it in limited intervals at a great cost of rapidly increasing her corruption. Otherwise, she's incredibly weak and struggles to kill even the most basic enemies at the start of the game. Resource management, especially your gold, is incredibly important, since so many things are stupidly expensive. If you go the lewd route, it becomes quite a bit easier to make money, but that doesn't really start paying off until later in the game when you unlock repeatable lewd jobs.
That leads me to the actual corruption system. Corruption is not simply a measure of how much Aura has done lewd things. Transforming into the Star Knightess, defeating certain enemies and bosses, and taking Vice actions, which unlock in Chapter 2, also add to it. There're also drugs and various items you can take to make her stronger at the cost of higher corruption and other negative side effects. This corruption serves two primary purposes. One is that it takes away from her willpower stat, which is her ability to resist the influence of the curse in various ways, and it also ensures she is able to make decisions on her own rather than being forced into one by the curse. The second, more significant one, is that it is used like a currency by the secondary antagonist/protagonist Alicia to corrupt Aura's mental world and cause changes that affect her not only in Roya but on Earth as well. This can be something as simple as making her uncomfortable with wearing glasses all the way up to fundamentally shifting major aspects of her core beliefs, values, and even memories. The visual and mechanical representations of the aspects of Aura's psyche that you can change are pretty cool too. You control Aura at night while she's in Roya, and you control Alicia in Aura's mind after Aura's time in Roya ends for the day, which leads to an interesting dynamic of trying to act as both characters. Some changes Alicia can make are actually helpful for Aura as well, so everything is a balancing act. Aura performing lewd favors can benefit her in the short term but hurt her corruption in the long run, while Alicia taking advantage of that corruption can sometimes make Aura stronger. Alicia also can't let Aura's corruption pile on too much or Aura's soul will break and lead to her death, which believe it or not is also bad for the villains.
While lewd things do ultimately contribute to Aura's corruption, it's really because Aura is highly principled and idealistic at the start of the game. She believes that doing those things would be betraying her boyfriend George even though it's a fantasy world and it isn't her real body she'd be offering up, whereas most other corruption mechanics I've seen are simply "sex = corruption." She will refuse to engage in any lewd acts at first until her willpower starts to waver and Alicia is able to take advantage of her curse and waning willpower to convince her to do these things anyway. Aura starts viewing these acts as exchanges that allow her to acquire valuable resources or skills despite her reservations, and while she is highly principled, she is also pragmatic and can be convinced into accepting such offers for the greater good. The lewd scenes themselves are of varying quality. There are no animations or voices, some sex sounds, and scenes are more like image slideshows. Some of the art is very good, and some of it is mediocre at best. The writing usually helps bolster the scenes though which is something I don't see very often in H-games.
Aura's brainwashing takes place slowly over the course of many in-game days, and the Earth story plays out largely in line with how much Alicia is able to corrupt Aura over time. For example, she won't suddenly hate her best friend Rose or George overnight, but the combination of many subtle shifts can eventually lead to fractured relationships and much, much worse. As the corruption progresses and Aura begins making more morally grey to outright evil decisions, what the game does so well is making her rationalizations believable while she ultimately slides down a slippery slope that gradually becomes harder to come back from. Her brainwashing playing out in the real world is similarly very well written with believable, mostly gradual transitions into new ways of thinking or viewing herself and others. Aura is highly intelligent and will often make very keen observations about her situations and the people around her, and more importantly, this is also what allows her to perform some of the mental gymnastics to justify her actions to herself and keep going despite her discomfort. This is the greatest strength of this game in my opinion; the writers really knew what they were doing.
Thank you if you read this far! I could honestly go on and on about the game, its characters, and what it ultimately has to say about human nature and the lines between what you would consider good versus evil not being as clear-cut as they might first seem, but I hit the character limit. This game is absolutely worth your time and money!

HOW does this rpgmaker h-game have more compelling story and characters than the vast majority of 'serious' media? The premise is insanely tacky but the execution is 1000%.
DON'T start on hard difficulty. This is a tricky game.

Among RPG Maker games, this one took a lot of planning and effort to get to its current point, and it really shows. From the beginning it's obvious that a lot of love and care went into making this game.

PROS:
-Custom UI with some quality-of-life features (like the quest journal and the bestiary to learn more about enemies)
-Clever level design, the maps aren't so large that you get lost in them, and their terrain features help you orient yourself no matter where you are. There's even shortcuts you unlock by raising gates, blowing up rocks and/or tying ropes so you can climb on
-No grinding for levels, items and/or gold
-Enemies have meaningful weaknesses, beyond merely taking extra damage, they can lose turns when ambushed or get enraged when you steal from them, etc.
-Protagonists that you can fall in love with and antagonists that you can really, really hate
-A gripping story, I was hooked right from the introduction, but once you get to fight the first of the seven generals, it feels like an episode of my favourite anime series
-A detailed system for 'customizing' your protagonist in both small and large ways, using a resource that builds up as you play the game, keep playing and unlock lots of changes like new dresses, shoes, hairstyles etc.
-Slice-of-life cutscenes that show what goes on in the protagonist's daily life when she isn't the heroine on a quest to save another world
-Five different difficulty levels so you can pick the one you enjoy best
-New Game + benefits that add replayability
-The developer worked on this for several years, and it's still getting updated with more content, even post-release
-You can experience the game through the demo version, completely free!

CONS:
-Enemies' meaningful weaknesses is a double-edged sword, since if you don't have a way to abuse their weakness they can be tough to beat. This matters less on easier difficulties (you can steamroll enemies regardless of their weaknesses) and much more on Hard Mode and Nightmare Mode (when even regular enemies are a challenge and some bosses are almost unbeatable without using their specific weaknesses, limiting your available strategies)
-Enemies don't return once defeated. While this is a pro in the sense there's no grinding, it also means that you cannot level up to outscale the enemies you're facing, unless you leave them alive and return to an earlier area once you are much stronger and they no longer pose a meaningful threat
-The game is focused on managing your resources, from HP and MP to money and even time, since learning new skills takes days of training. From the start you rely on consumables for healing, so if you mismanage your resources - if you go to an area you're not ready for, and bash your head against tough enemies instead of going somewhere else, you can run out - and then eventually reach a point when you're either completely stuck, or you have to claw your way out of a deep hole, painfully slowly. Again, this matters much less on easier difficulties (where you get showered in gold and upgrading stats doesn't end the day) and much more on Hard Mode and Nightmare Mode (when sometimes you can't progress without the right skill, but you don't have the money to afford the skill, either - I had to reload earlier saves plenty of times while playing, myself)
-Steam version is censored until you apply a patch, though thankfully it's available for free
-The Slice-of-life cutscenes are common in the early game, but they happen far less often unless you specifically hunt for more of them by 'customizing' the protagonist. They're undeniably a good addition, I just wish there were more of them, especially when you're going for a pure run


I could go on, but I don't want to give out too many spoilers. This game shines when you give it a chance and experience it for yourself, which you can do with the free demo. All I'm going to say is, I wouldn't sink dozens of hours (the review shows 60+ hours now but that's not counting the time I spent with the demo) or write guides about it if I didn't enjoy it. If the trailer and screenshots catch your fancy at all, please give this one a try.

Advice: play normal difficulty.
What I thought playing hard mode was going to be:
- more likely to be partially corrupted
- less likely to have a boring playthrough where nothing sexual happens because it's too easy to always do the right thing
What hard mode is:
- a horrible tedious slog where even the real-world corruption plot doesn't progress because it's waiting for you to finish quests in the fantasy world
- a spiral where things really feel crushing and overbearing, and despite brief moments of getting a grip on things, almost seem to just get more and more difficult as the game continues
- nothing sexy happening for, well, practically 25 hours because progression is so slow (at 25 hours, the lewd stuff is just now getting past groping and kissing)
Also, yes, you need to install a patch. I didn't know that until I was FOUR hours in though.
I'm a patient person, but I almost rage-quit after the story line demanded that I spend 7 turns of a boss fight preparing my ultimate attack, only to have the main character killed in one hit despite me assigning other characters to guard her and her having full health and a defensive stance. There was literally nothing I could do to win that fight other than repeat the entire thing and pre-prepare for the battle in a way that I only ever would have rationally done if I knew what was about to happen. Sorry, but that's bull****. The *flow* of the entire game is woefully ****ed in hard mode. Just don't do it. It's such a terrible experience *it shouldn't even be an option*.
All of that said, I think this is likely a great game in normal mode. I've been reading the dev's blogs on Patreon for a year, and they are insightful and it's clear that a great deal of care was placed into the story.
I will, at some point, beat it, I'm sure. But at 25 hours and just barely scratching the surface of the game , I think I need to set it down for a while. I should feel excitement, not trepidation, at seeing more quests open up and the world map expand. I don't though. I'm just the incarnation of fear for how much of a slog this may continue to be, and while I can change my difficulty at any time, that's not going to compensate my character's stats or monetary situation for how long I've spent playing hard mode. I just... honestly. RPG Maker fights are not fun. Don't act like they're fun. Don't make me do this pointless work. I'm not playing your game because I want to fight the same set of monsters ten times in a row inputting the exact same strategy that worked for me the first time. Less combat, more story please.

The Store Page doesn't do this game justice. It's far deeper and more engaging that it seems. You'd think it's some dark fantasy about a hopeless heroine that inevitably is corrupted by darkness with lewd overtones.
Except, the heroine is actually extremely likable, and not at all helpless. I find myself actually rooting for her, and have come to dread seeing her "corruption" move forward. Of course, the nature of the game makes me curious to see where that goes, too, but I kind of don't want it to go all the way. You could say I've become invested in her character.
This is a fantastic game in its own right, even without the H premise. That said, the H premise helps it a lot, in that if it wasn't an H game, I probably would've never tried it. It's an RPG Maker Game with the default RPG Maker Artstyle and default RPG Maker Music. If not for the H premise, most people would likely dismiss it without giving it a chance, missing a great experience in the process.
The mechanics are really good, too. No skill feels out of place, and monsters really challenge you to think of a way to combine your abilities to beat them.
I haven't gone through the entire game, but so 10 hours in, it's 9.69/10.

I'm not a fan of NTR and the moral degeneration plot goes very far into the MC becoming a sociopath, but the game's just so well written that I ended up playing quite a lot. Two main warnings about things that may not be to your personal tastes: The H content is very slow burn compared to most RPG maker eroge and it took me until my second IRL day of playing to get into scenes I consider in depth enough to be "satisfying". Also to really be the target audience for the H content available you have to REALLY like hardcore NTR like, a lot.

PROS: well written story with characters that are tragic and interesting, inventive mechanics for the moral degeneration side of things, challenging gameplay loop with score-based bonuses that carry into NG+

CONS: Some dialogue is a bit rough or dated in places and at points the corruption storyline can stall or drag as it waits for time to pass and for you to trigger certain event flags in the right order

As is true for most of these, grab the patch from the game's official site before playing.

A surprisingly tough tactical JRPG.
The game is about resource management, beating up bad guys, and managing lewd events with practical game play. it is very well made.
So, why is it resource management?
Because every time you rest, your character looses a piece of herself.
When a new day passes, your character looses relationships, core motivations, her boyfriend, like everything is on the table in this game of strip poker. It is like choosing "Can i loose an arm, or do i need to loose a leg today" Except it's slowly turning her into a bimbo. And there are a lot of good scenes peppered throughout the game.
Also, it does not pull punches. The bad guys are actual human traffickers, drug dealers, killers, and horrible people. And giving your hero the will to fight as this curse slowly destroys her is a very rewarding experience.
Game balance is rewarding, the fights are well made, and you can choose to loose things in an order that benefits her instead of kills her. (Her boyfriend might enjoy you loosening her up a little) It is an extremely well made game, but it is slow, there is a lot of talking, and it requires your full attention.
If you like JRPG's, this game is for you. 10/10
If you want a quick nut, eh, not so much. 7/10