I wanted to explain the scale I’m using for the ecchi games scores, as it probably looks like I hate all the games I play based on the amount of 5 and below I give them. Scores are always going to be subjective and highly influenced by when you play something and whats happening in your life at the time, so honestly I find scores to be more a suggestion then some fact of game quality.
Note that 1 and 10’s are basically never going to happen. Perfect games don’t exist, and a 1 is either unplayable or nonexistent. So in a way I’m using an 8 point scale, which is still better then most reviewer sites pretending to have a 10 point scale and actually having maybe 5 scores they actually give. Or the 10.0 scale which gives them 100 numbers to use and they still only use like 30 of them.
Gameplay Score
This is the hardest one to judge honestly. My tastes in games isn’t consistent. I can love one soul crushing RPG then hate the next. Love one really solid platformer and find the next kinda boring. Find a mechanically broken game great fun but a mechanically solid one a snore. So the scores are based solely on how much I enjoyed the game by the time I beat it.
I do tend to think of how highly a game is rated and try to be fair, but I recognize that I like trash games pretty often while hating what many consider “good”. As a reviewer(I hate calling myself that), all I think is really important is being honest about my skill level and how I felt the game was in terms of enjoyment and fairness.
Story Score
Most ecchi games have throwaway stories, its just a fact. Actually most video games have problems delivering stories so this isn’t unique to ecchi. I mostly score a lot of them on if they have anything to say or on how well the comedy is handled. I don’t have any real rules for the scoring. Honestly if a game is just funny or tries to make me think or gets to me emotionally then I’ll score it higher. Note that I don’t care if the sexy is part of the plot or not. If characters need to grope each other for power, I won’t lower the story score for that so long as the plot uses it consistently, though it also won’t score more points. Sexy stuff is just part of the package for telling a story and I do think sex and silly sexual antics can be just as part of telling a good story as anything else. It all comes down to the quality of including it and not messing up themes.
Ecchi Score
Scoring ecchi is the easiest thing, since I can just look at how much and how it’s used to decide the score. Which means even if a game doesn’t do it for me fetish wise, I can still score it mostly objectively. Note that when I refer to ecchi I mostly mean how sexual something is, usually for the purpose of getting sexually excited. Sex jokes do not equal a higher score and boring sexual stuff, even a lot, might still get scored low.
Basically the more there is the higher the score. Just some models and some camera angles is a low score and barely belongs here. Some fetishy outfits can help, but will likely still end with a low score. The more cgs and outfits and use of ecchi during gameplay bumps the score up until you get to things like Peach Beach Splash and Queen’s Blade where basically every reward is ecchi or something to let you get to more ecchi content. So Ryza is on the low end while something like Criminal Girls gets a middling score and of course Peach Beach Splash is about as high on lewd as it can get. Agarest is a good example of a game with plenty attempts at ecchi but fails the delivery every time so it gets a low score despite having a decent amount. Moero Chronicle also has a high amount of attempted lewd content that just fails to deliver do to presentation or pose choices.
