TW: Grotesque rape and sexual imagery. Yes, this game is disturbing enough that I need to use red font. Reader discretion is strongly advised! Images are blurred but I’m unsure if that’s enough.

The fact that I found Ruby Striker enjoyable does somewhat surprise me given that it is pretty much has no plot other than a girl being viciously raped. Aren’t I a feminist or something? We’re kinda not supposed to like that shit. Additionally, it is not like there is any deeper meanings such as in Euphoria, so what is it that made Ruby Striker, and to a lesser extent Lapis Gunner, so enjoyable?

Well, the best way to illustrate why would be through this overdue review of the third game in the trilogy; Amber Breaker. I am not quite sure how to feel about Amber Breaker. The disclaimer at the start probably already gives away what my feelings are. This is not the first time I have covered a game with notably disturbing content. Ruby Striker was about a girl being raped, tortured, and degraded by a demonic tentacle demon in a hellish landscape, and I enjoyed this… let that sink in.

Amber Breaker is NOT the most disturbing game I have covered. Both Starless: Nymphomaniac’s Paradise and Euphoria are games that I cannot shut the fuck up about, and Doki Doki Literature Club! is starting to reach that point as well. Amber Breaker is not quite as disturbing as the former two but it may be more so than the latter. Note that I say “may be” because it gets kinda hard to measure something when it starts overflowing and spilling out of the container and you just kinda check out which one made a bigger mess on the floor.

For one wanting to know what the plot of the trilogy is, read my Ruby Striker review. The short version is that this is a magical girl deconstruction for those that thought Madoka Magica was too lighthearted and optimistic. A realistic depiction of what would happen if one of these evil villains got a hold of these girls and to precisely what lengths they would go to. Ted Cruz jokes aside, Zodiac is an utterly chilling character in just how cold and sadistic he is. Considering that all three games are narrated from his perspective, there is an excellent job done at capturing an air of helplessness and turmoil. The first two games were meant to show Zodiac bringing two strong women to their knees (both figuratively and literally) by torturing them until they become submissive and complacent.

If you are wondering how the fuck any decent human being can find this kind of shit sexually arousing, then you must be new here. Truthfully, trying to explain why is rather difficult. After all, don’t most people have this thing called a sense of empathy? The answer to that is to look at who is currently sitting in the white house. But yes, I DO possess a sense of empathy and I care for all people except for murderers, rapists, and furries, so why doesn’t it kick in here? The answer is that in a strange way, it DOES.

I’ve made it clear by now that I don’t experience sexual arousal in the same way most do. One can’t just show a hot girl getting plowed by Chad Thundercock and expect me to get aroused. Now if it was a hot girl getting plowed by Charlotte Thundercock then it might be different, but even then it requires a sense of finesse and delicacy. An eroge needs to do something that makes the player imagine certain sensations and feelings. One needs to be immersed within the setting for arousal to properly take over. I am going to just leave it at Ruby Striker’s description was good enough to emphasize just the right feelings and sensations for me to know that something fucked up was happening, but without letting it sink in how one is effected. If that sounds complicated and difficult to understand, that is because it is. There is a reason that erotica is cited as the most difficult genre to write.

A major element of the previous two games was the old “you say you don’t like it trick but your body says otherwise” cliche, but what made them effective is that the previous games frequently alternated between inflicting immense feelings of sexual pleasure and pain on Ruby and Lapis until the two feelings began to intertwine and become indistinguishable. Not only is this expressed in the occurrences, but also in the dialogue.

Amber Breaker also does this very well in just how natural all the dialogue feels. All of it comes across as a completely believable reaction to such an absurd scenario. The way how Amber is not only completely traumatized, but also floored by how unrealistic everything feels is exactly how one should react to such a situation. After all, I would be in a state of shock and disbelief if I was restrained and had my mouth stuffed full of tentacle demon cock… but that would be more because I thought tentacle demons only existed in hentai games and how I react would be… well it depends what demon cock tastes and feels like… why yes, I do think about this stuff in my spare time, this is why I never go outside.

I should mention that I enjoyed Amber Breaker at first and was almost prepared to say that it was the best of the trilogy. I mean, one can definitely say there was some creativity involved when one of the scenes includes hanging Amber upside down and submerging her face first in a pool of her, Ruby, and Lapis’s ejaculate fluids in an attempt to get her to drink them. It was effective at eliciting the same sense of cognitive dissonance from the player that is also going through Amber’s mind; one realizes how fucked up this all is yet still enjoys. In fact, one enjoying this despite how demented this shit is feeds into a psychological moebius loop where the opposing sensations feed into each other and amplify the end result.

I have mentioned in past reviews that the art direction and the music were all impeccable and contributed greatly to the game’s atmosphere, and the same is true for Amber Breaker. On top of that, there is only one decision point this time, and this further emphasizes the air of restriction and powerless that permeates this trilogy. I don’t quite see why we even needed to have the one choice to begin with given that one will inevitably just save and go back to it, but there is nonetheless a lot less of this in Amber Breaker.

Amber Breaker sounds pretty good so far, so where did it go wrong? Well, it started on one of the branching paths from that one choice you are given. One of the options is to bring Lapis in to sit and chat with Amber, and by “sit and chat” I mean rape her along with the creatures she was forced to birth in the previous game. Yeah, Lapis has fallen under Zodiac’s control and as a result, this does severe psychological damage to Amber to the point where all remaining strength of her’s is lost and she’s now a nervous wreck. After that, Amber is forced to penetrate Ruby (who is still resisting Zodiac’s control) using her fist before one final desperate scene where Ruby and Amber struggle to hang on to their list bit of control before they inevitably succumb to Zodiac’s powers and hand over their jewel stars. The thing is, I knew the trilogy was going to end like this but the game makes it as hard to watch as possible.

The best way I could describe the ending of Amber Breaker is that any arousal felt just kinda wore off and the fact that I was watching three underage girls being subjected to otherworldly torment that will last for all eternity began to emerge. I recognized the serious anguish and despair in Ruby and Amber’s voices, and it felt notably distinct from before. When you add that this pretty much means the end of the world, you have a seriously bleak ending.

Describing just what Amber Breaker did wrong in its final act is going to be tricky given that the events themselves don’t sound out of place with the rest of the series. As I said, I saw it coming. However, part of me was hoping that the ending would at least be something surprising or of artistic merit. Now that I think about it, I think the reason I was fine with the first two games is because they both ended on cliffhangers, meaning that the pretense that something good or at the very least artistic might happen was still there. In Amber Breaker, it’s all lost and you see that it really is nothing more than a depraved hentai game.

Eroge, and even nukige, are all forms of artistic expression and should be judged as such. What really leaves a bad taste in my mouth about Amber Breaker’s ending, aside from how horrifying and scarring it is, is the lack of creativity in a series that has been shown no shortage of it prior. It just makes me think how any form of art is severely limited if it is only allowed to focus on one specific area. Even with the a goal to serve as fap fuel, such a thing can be greatly enhanced by evoking other feelings that give one a greater connection.

What I would have done is have the three girls overcome Zodiac specifically by embracing their perverted nature that Zodiac brought out of them in the first place. IE, Zodiac’s plan of grooming them into pain loving sluts backfires and leads to his downfall because nothing he does effects them anymore. It would serve as a classic “hoisted by his own petard” ending where Zodiac realizes he would have won if he just killed them and taken the Jewel Stars when he had the chance. And also, maybe end with a three way between the girls just for good measure.

But nope, that doesn’t cater to male dominance enough so no one thought of it. I have mentioned briefly in my review of Ruby Striker how the concept of men thinking it is sexy to degrade strong women into submissive sluts should have been horrifying. I actually do have a pretty strong distaste for that trope but for a different reason than one would expect. The key problem with “turning a pure maiden into a filthy slut” as a humiliation trope is that it inherently implies that being a slut is shameful and degrading.

This type of trope holds awareness of the fact that women DO in fact desire sex and are not all sexless prudes, but it still promotes the idea that it is wrong to not be a sexless prude. There is never any “female empowerment” message in any of these because if women realize they can be openly sexual AND empowered then they will no longer equate female sexuality to being submissive and complacent and this fetish will no longer exist. As a result, they get to have their cake and eat it by making women realize they are a slut but never letting them realize that it’s okay to be one.

Anyway, it’s not hard to see why MangaGamer’s new hosting site did not approve of this game’s content. Euphoria may have worse content, but it also had the artistic substance to justify it existing. However, Amber Breaker is still available for download on DLSite if anyone still wants to give it a shot, but for the rest of us, I don’t think it will be a huge loss. I can certainly say that Amber was not the only one broken by this game.

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