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(2 edits) (+4)(-2)

Overall Ravager is among the best H-Games I've ever played, if you're into the kind of things this game has to offer, you can stop reading here and just start playing.

I wanna start the long part of my comment with the basic premise of the game, the idea to let player take the role usually given to the antagonist is by itself already interesting but not that novel anymore, yet I've never seen it executed that well.

In other evil-MC games, the player is often either forced too much into being cruel or evil, either simply by a lack of options the game presents, which is frustrating and breaks immersion, or narrative apologetics that excuse the player's behavior too much and thereby drain the actual evilness from it. Another problem is that the consequences of and the writing after evil options sometimes seem short and vapid as if the writers just want them there for the sake of it rather than maintain the notion that the MC might actually be evil throughout the entire writing process. Ravager exhibits none of these problems, stays clear of forcing unnecessary moral ambiguity, and even better: It manages to incorporate machiavellistically justifiable "evilness" (eg. dooming woman to be raped by kobolds to win a war) alongside pure, pointless cruelty. During my playtoughs I often felt free to do as I please, be merciful or cruel at a whim, scare them, spare them, rape them, kill them, whatever I please, yet I've also often felt the necessity to make the fate of characters a strategic decision. This is astonishingly well executed.

The next thing I want to touch on is the decision to have the MC decisively be a Dragon. No scaly humanoid with horns and tail, no shapeshifting into humanoid form or any other excuse to make the MC a human in some way. This feels very refreshing and makes this a very appealing and interesting fantasy, not just another basic H-Game fantasy sprinkled with animalistic traits.

On the narrative side of things, the game is good at presenting a satisfying power fantasy, giving the player the lethal form of a dragon, with all the perks that come with that, while not being invulnerable, esp at the beginning. When looking for them, there are cracks in the facade though: When attacking Sabetha and Inej for example the fight seem somewhat contrived and not really authentic IMO, but given the sheer amount of unapologetic fantasy in the game and that MC is a dragon, nailing this kind of thing is anything but easy and overall the game does very well in that regard.

I also really like how information is exposed, it risks leaving small gaps in the player's understanding of the world to have the player think about it and/or have things fall into place from other characters or plotlines without leaving the player too clueless at any point in time.

In terms of characters Ravager has some weaknesses, Balthorne and Darja especially are rather bland characters(although Darja is very likable) and yes I'm applying rather high standards here, compared to many other games(esp. H-Games) Ravager's characters are perfectly fine, and considering how many characters there already are compared to how big the game is as of now this is excusable, but still, I feel like there's some lost potential there.

In terms of assets, the game already good but still feels a bit scruffy here and there. IMHO it could use some nice artwork for more non-sexual and semi-sexual scenes(like the one biting Balthorne's arm, or the one heating up the water in the minecart with dragon fire). One example where such artwork would be nice is the scene where you can kill Heloïse yourself for a specific reason(not gonna elaborate to not spoil it here). I have no experience developing VNs so idk how much development resources these artworks cost(nor how much this kind of project brings in) so maybe this is a limitation given by the scope of the project and also, as the disclaimer at the start of the game says, the assets might not be final, but I think this is worth pointing out anyways.

I've been playing on version 4.3.12 so if there's a later version, things might have changed.

(+2)

Thank you for your thoughtful review! I'm glad that you're enjoying the game, and appreciate some of the design decisions that I've made. I'd certainly like to add more (and more modern) illustrations for less explicit scenes - our artist Lubbio is already working at 100% capacity, but I've taken on Undoodle (who did the final showdown with Balthorne) to help with that.