Release date: 2019-12-11 (final DLC issued on 2020-02-10)
Developer & publisher: Eva Kiss
"Good Girl Gone Bad" is a Patreon-funded Western visual novel that started its production when the Patreon VN scene was still pretty new. After all, the very first VN project appeared on Patreon by the end of 2016, while the production of GGGB had started in the middle of 2017. And I have to say, that despite its age, this game still remains the best female protagonist corruption game available on the market.
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| Iris knows her worth. |
When you start the game, the very first thing you will notice is the art style. There are no crappy 3D generated renders here - both the sprites and the CGs are fully hand drawn, while the backgrounds are filtered photographs. I know that some people apparently dislike Eva Kiss' art, but I think it's just crazy to prefer 3D renders over such unique drawn images. Admittedly, it's a known fact that Eva uses tracing from actual adult video scenes to help her draw images quickly, which is why they were able to produce a very long and complex game in just a little over two years with hand drawn art. It's crazy, but people were able to actually find the exact porn scenes and erotic photos, which Eva had used as reference material for her work. I personally don't think there is anything wrong with that, in fact, it's admirable how consistent the art in GGGB is, using such a technique, but other people might have a different opinion.
Eva Kiss themselves is a very mysterious developer, with very little known about their personal life, other than the fact they are a native Spanish speaker. They have never even confirmed their gender, but despite this most people online now think Eva is a woman, and every discussion about their works has people referring to Eva as 'she'. Creating works with female protagonists might have something to do with that :-)
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| Vanilla sex with her boyfriend. |
Speaking about female protagonists, the one in "Good Girl Gone Bad" is named Ashley Graham. She is your typical college student, a bit nerdy, with good grades, one best friend and a pretty plain boyfriend, named Eric. For all intents and purposes, despite having an established name (unlike many modern Patreon VNs, which allow you to change the protagonist name), she is a blank slate with little personality, beyond being a 'good girl'. That is understandable, though, as it allows us to lead her in any direction, and mold her according to our whim, based on the choices we make.
Based on what we do in the game, Ashley might marry her boyfriend, and live happily ever after, join a gang, become a porn star, or break up with her boyfriend and choose one of the many other potential love interests. And there are a lot of love interests to choose from.
The first love interest for Ashley is the obvious one - her boyfriend Eric of two years. His is a simple 'good guy', with little else going for him, but everything changes, when he decided to channel his 'good guy energy' to a higher purpose, and chooses to leave on a humanitarian mission to Somalia for half a year. Eric is a very strange character, as he is absent for 80% of the game, and very few players will try to be faithful to him during his absence, at least on the first run.
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| Girls just want to have fun |
Anyone who has ever played a corruption game knows that leaving your girlfriend unattended is a bad idea. Leaving her for half a year is just asking for trouble. GGGB differs strongly from any other corruption game I have ever played, because the trouble does not really come knocking at the door in a forceful manner. Most corruption games have a character, or a group of characters, that purposefully tries to seduce, blackmail or corrupt the female character for no other reason than because they can. That is not necessarily a bad approach, and it has its perks, but that's not the path this particular VN took. With very few exceptions, the characters in the VN do not have a purpose to corrupt Ashley. She simply can interact with various different characters with different values, and due to the interpersonal osmosis she will start getting interested in their values herself. In a way, GGGB is a self-corruption game, as Ashley corrupts herself, with a generous helping of your guiding hand.
Take, for example, another main character Jack. He is a muscular and good looking playboy, with a successful business, sexual freethinking, and who loves to party. If Ashley chooses to interact with him, she might get seduced by his charisma, free lifestyle and partying. She might start thinking that her absent boyfriend is just too plain for her, and that Jack might just give her the excitement she has been lacking in her life. And she might just find a golden heart under all that playboy facade.
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| Get attention of the gossip mags. |
"Good Girl Gone Bad" has a huge roster of characters for Ashley to engage with, and majority of them are not malicious in the slightest, other than having different values to her. Take for example Jessica, Jack's fuck-buddy. She is a slutty party girl, who loves drugs and sex. Ashley's best friend Eva hates her for being so shallow, but Ashley herself has no beef with Jessica. If those two start hanging together, Ashley gets pulled into Jess' lifestyle, and they might even end up as an item.
Then there is Eva, the best friend. She is basically Ashley v2.0, which is why they are probably best friends. She has a boyfriend Dave, who is an artist, but lacks direction in life, and in a surprising turn-around, Ashley can be the one to mold Eva into a completely different person. They might even end up together by the end of the game. Or Ashley might steal Eva's boyfriend Dave and leave her in the dust.
The other prominent characters are Tyrone, a rising rap star, Jasmin, a transgender masseuse, Ryan, a CEO of a company, Natasha, a bookshop owner with a penchant for swinging, and even Ashley's own Mom and Dad, who have recently separated. And yes, there are incest routes in the game for them both.
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| Threesomes are always fun. |
If there are any malicious characters, I can count only two. First would be Wilson, a member of a street gang, who decides he wants to fuck Ashley, after briefly meeting her, and will use any underhanded means to accomplish that. Another, is Eric's own father. He is a creep and a sexual deviants who gets of on the idea of shagging his son's girlfriend and will aggressively try to seduce her, even going as far as drugging her, if the seduction approach does not work.
I might be a deviant, but my favourite route in the game was Arthur's and I especially liked the ending where Iris got involved. Other than that, I loved the whole Wheel scenario and the Ethan's route - it was just so naughty on multiple levels. Out of the normal routes, Jack's probably tugged at me the most. Seeing Ashley thaw out a playboy's heart was just so wholesome.
Reading GGGB was a real pleasure, as Ashley's actions and behaviour were pretty sympathetic and understandable majority of the time. Most of the characters are not too deep, but they do have interesting stories to tell, and the way the romance works was pretty believable. The writing was great, and I would never have believed the game was written by a non-English speaker, if I didn't know that.
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| Cucking Eric... |
However, the writing is not why this game is one of the greats of the Western VNs. One word: "complexity". Every single thing you do in the game, every single choice matters, and changes the game in large and small ways. Something as simple as getting a piercing will result in every character commenting on it in their own way. And that's just a small taste. Seemingly something as simple as Ashley getting new clothes will completely change lots of text in the game (and there are multiple outfits to choose from). While other developers would just mention a few times new accessories their characters have obtained, Eva has added tens of thousands of words for each accessory Ashley can wear, and that is something you won't even ever see if you only play the game once.
What's more, Ashley is not the only one who gets corrupted. Almost every character also changes, based on their interactions with Ash, and finish the game as different people than they started it. They also get their own endings too. And there are multiple variations of each ending both for Ashley and for other characters. Depending how you count, Ashley has somewhere between 15 and 20 different endings, and 50 to 60 endings for other characters. This is a game that has ben designed to be replayed many many times to get every possible ending, as playing it just once you will see maybe 15% of the available content. I did get all the endings, after spending a week with the game, and finished it in just above 60 hours.
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| Ashley shows submissive tendencies. |
However, after scouring the game in every single direction, I also understood that the game's massive size has also became its main weakness. In order to create such a huge web of choices and consequences, Eva had to cut certain corners, which becomes apparent on subsequent playthroughs. In order to minimize the workload, Eva made a certain choice not to create CG images as we understand them, but to create various parts of the scenes, that are later combined in engine to become a composite image, and which allowed her to swap parts of the image with another. This means, that she has reused the same sex scenes for various characters, by simply swapping the character models when needed. Visually this becomes aggressively boring after the third or so playthrough, when you realize the same sex scenes are repeated over and over again, only with different characters inserted into them. This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the text in such repeated scenes is also mainly identical, usually simply swapping the character names, while keeping the other text the same. Considering such text is treated as 'new', you cannot even skip it with a 'skip read' option.
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| Gangsters know how to have fun. |
The other issue I have to mention is the believability of certain scenarios. While I did find the whole Wilson scenario hot, in a more traditional 'forced corruption' way, going trough it Ashley's personality took a very sudden turn. That said, I fully forgive it, due to the fact I found the scenario very interesting. I'm less forgiving regarding some things that have happened to Eva. Ashley can completely destroy her life if she so wishes, and that doesn't even require a low 'good' stat to do that. I don't think Eva's certain endings should have been available if Ashley is too 'good'. Moreover, deciding to go through with it only makes you lose one 'good' point, while deciding to have incest sex loses you 5 points. To me it seems completely unfair, but what do I know...
Not a criticism, but I also find it weird how hard it is to reach the incest ending. It was clearly added to entice the Patreon incestfag crowd, but is the single most difficult ending to achieve. I had to replay portions of the game four times to finally raise my stats to the level needed to proceed with it. In a way it could almost be considered a secret ending.
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| Girls gone wild! |
I also found two of the available endings - Jasmin's and Jessica's - to be pretty shallow. They have great sexual chemistry with Ashley, that's true, but I saw little romantic chemistry with them, so the suggestion 'let's date' at the end of the game felt somewhat out of the left field. It doesn't help that those two are more of subheroines, rather than main characters, and have lower number of scenes than pretty much everyone else. Not to mention that Jasmin's portrayal as a constantly angry and horny transwoman seems somewhat problematic.
That said, for a game with so many choices, and such a complexity of what those choices influence, I have encountered very few bugs with GGGB, and none of them were game-breaking. There were a few visual mishaps, where floating art assets appeared on the screen, Jasmin's endings where she ended up alone were visually glitched, making certain choices I got the wrong ending for Eric, and three error messages happened during three separate Arthur's endings (though they could be safely ignored). All in all, these were all very minor things, and I'm frankly astonished this is all the bugs I have encountered in this game.
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| Office sex is a classic. |
To sum up, "Good Girl Gone Bad" is one of the highest quality Western visual novels you can currently play, so you absolutely should check it out. It has lots of choices and lots of endings, and no two playthroughs will be similar. Your protagonist can end up as a good girl, or a bad one, or outright evil, but it always will be a pleasure to experience that. I personally eagerly await Eva's new game "Our Red String", which is nearing its production end and will soon be available to the public.
P.S. I also feel the need to mention that while the game does not have a gallery by default, there exists a fan-made gallery mod you can add to the game, though I have found it slightly inaccurate. Some of the scenes I haven't seen got unlocked way earlier than they should have, which might spoil those scenes for you if you check the gallery often.
Links of Interest
Final Verdict: 87%
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