I played the version from DD48, played around 10hours just until after the festival of greed. But only decided to give feedback now. I'm aware you can't actually use the feedback, but you know, maybe for your next game. I ended the game with barely any TF. Aura likes shoes now, has contacts and lets her hair down. I very much enjoyed the game as a challenge to rush through it with minimal corruption, I never used her Star Knightess form. I might have missed some stuff, and things mentioned below might be wrong, the game is quite large already after all. I'll play the full game once it's out, but decided to wait for now seeing all the under construction areas.
Anyways, the game is great. The game has extremely well done balancing and quest design. The UI and QoL is as good as it gets and it's amazing to see that a game can reach such popularity based on intrinsic gameplay quality alone. It's not just "good for an RPGMaker game, but a good game an sich.
However, I've come to nitpick Aura (in a very stream of conscious like way), not to praise it:
Consumables:
The consumables are worse than in other games. The problem is that you can use the same ingredients for permanent stat boosts or general benefits (bombs). The only exception is emerald tea. Given that players don't use consumables anyway in RPGs, and hard fights can also be won by spending 4 corruption, there just isn't any real reason for them.
Info:
Skills attack with X% power, but what is power? Skills ignore defence, but what is the enemy defence, what is the calculation behind it (I'm assuming it's the default 4*ATK - 2*DEF)? This would tie in well with the book reading system if Aura could learn how the inner mechanics of the game work. For me as a player it would also limit the feeling of RNG since I no longer have to guess which moves are worth it.
Eyes of Greed also aren't clear, I thought it would permanently lower your WIL. But since the lost willpower resets upon day end it doesn't really matter.
Visuals:
Displaying the womb crest would be neat, but I'm just a sucker for displaying changes on the character.
Eyes of Greed seems like a missed opportunity. I'm not sure what the fetish of it is, but maybe show it by giving her eyes long luscious lascivious lashes.
Art is kinda meh... The sex scenes often look lifeless and mechanical. The artist seems to have improved a lot over time though., and quantity has a quality of its own.
Aura's hand-on-tits standing image is kinda silly, especially since it's the only one. Same with Alicia's arrogant expounding pose.
Dialogue:
Oh my special place. I guess it can't be helped, but these literal Japanese translations sound very silly. It seems to be limited to the early game though, a simple dialogue review of those scenes would do wonders.
Dialogues between characters are fine, albeit a bit verbose. That's the problem with campy characters, they take up a lot of dialogue space especially in the horrible RPGMaker format. Also, I feel the dialogues could be a lot more condensed while still maintaining the same characterization.
Dialogues are very readable once you enable the option that displays all the text at once. It's still annoying with the very slow moving ellipses and exclamations of the campy characters though.
Savescumming:
Forget Star Shine, Aura's true divine gift is Save Scum. The game clearly isn't meant to be played without saving (especially not a first time), but it does worsen all RNG aspects. The moment something has a 10% chance of working it works, you can easily evade all spazzing enemies, and you'll never get locked into dialogue options. BUT, that doesn't mean it's actually fun to spend time save-loading.
RNG:
Super effective skills give a buff that gives 50% evasion. This is terrible for consistency, both on your and the enemy's side. I won many battles through sheer luck and Aura's divine gift of Save Scum. I'm generally not fond of miss chances in RPGs, and would prefer just plain damage reductions (the RNG is still in the move's damage volatility).
RNG also exists in the final stand of the enemies. Once enemies get low enough in health they get a damage boost and defence malus. It's vital that you use this to your advantage, BUT you can't see the enemy health so you can't actually work around this.
The enemies with fixed paths are fine, but then you have the spazzing enemies. The tutorial makes it seem like you can always bypass enemies, so you're primed to do that. Moreover, you don't want to fight enemies since they (mostly) don't give anything. With spazzing enemies it's still possible to bypass them, it's just annoying and requires a lot of save-loading. There's no skill involved, it's just luck. Even worse with things like the spider where you have to light all candles while avoiding her spazzing. If you want me to fight an enemy, force me to do it, if you want me to bypass an enemy with intelligence and stealth don't make it RNG heavy.
Difficulty:
There's some huge difficulty spikes, the primary one was Barry and his pal. Fortunately, Aura's Save Scum allowed me to pretend the fight never happened.
I felt constantly underlevelled, probably that also affected why I felt it to be RNG heavy.
I missed the slime (didn't have enough mana for it at the time) and that seems vital since you have an extra body in fights.
Corruption break being a game over is kinda harsh, a late game gameover which can't be avoided will cause players to just play too cautious. What if there aren't any corruption perks left to take? I'd be depending on your skill as DM, and making this choice early on is quite annoying. It's just unfair to be able to lose the game 20 hours in. Why not give a horrible debuff at high corruption, or force players to spend it. In general I just always spent all corruption, and doubt I'd ever have any problems with excess corruption, but I'm still paranoid like that.
Partymembers:
Partymembers hit like tissue paper, probably because I was rushing and they didn't get the guild levels.
Charlotte was the only one who carried her weight, despite her defences being lacking (but Aura's Save Scum gift allowed me to keep enemies from targetting her).
The others managed to consistently do 0 damage (thanks RPGMaker damage calculations), and only mattered as meat shields or consumable dispensers.
Pacing:
There are no H-scenes early on, and the tutorial drags a lot. Unfortunately once the player decides to skip (to see whether the game is worth the text) you'll lose them. I bounced off the game earlier and only got back in it when I decided to actually sit through all the dialogues. The front seems like a place where you could easily add an H-esque-scene. I've heard it's a strategy to keep the unworthy out, but it still sucks since the game is so good once you get past the initial hurdle.
Also, despite the so-called slow corruption you can immediately show your panties to a shopkeeper and flash several guards. Though the first real scene was the threesome in the refugee camp.
The real world dialogues are very frontloaded. After a while the deluge changes to a trickle though. But just after the verbose tutorial you enter the game world, loot the skelly, go to the guild, and BAM game done new scene. By that time you don't even know that the game is good yet and you just have to assume the game gets as good as people say.
Ludo-Narrative Dissonance:
Alicia is bad, right? So when playing as her, I'm supposed to make the most incompetent choices, no? But is that true? I can see players getting fucked over by not taking a well thought-out Aura corruption path and getting inundated with unusable corruption points. I'd make it somewhat clear that Alicia is actually keeping Aura from dieing by corrupting her. Also, lewdness and the corruption results seemed to only have positives, and I got shafted by not getting Aura's criminality up enough. But at that point, why would I avoid corruption as Aura?
Fuck, this is the "Spec Ops: The Line" of H-Games.
Real-world Aura and game-world aura are completely disconnected. Game-world Aura can suck dicks while real-world Aura is still a prude.
NTR:
George deserves everything that's coming to him. Praise be Demon King RiCHAD. Ok.
Fan Art:
Anyway, I'm just listing negatives since those are easier to list. I love the game, and look forward to playing it fully once it's released.
Aura is cute, CUTE!
