Hey hey people, John Ryonareviewer here with a double (or quadruple) feature.

Still haven't finished Syakuga, but I've now gone through the entirety of the Depravia series. I suppose it would be more apt to call it the Blue Mad Diode trilogy, since Graveyard Executioner has no relation story-wise to Depravia 1 or Egrigorl (henceforth "Depravia 2") but has most of the same concepts. It's an unrelated spinoff, really.

Depravia 1 and 2 are very similar to each other. The core gameplay loop is you playing as an angel who goes to some hellish nightmare region where girls are being raped and killed in the background. You platform and engage in simple-but-functional combat against various demons, using powerups and collecting currency to buy ability increases, until you fight a boss and complete the level. In between levels, you go to a hub map where you can talk to the local shopkeeper and choose which level you want to play or replay. One weird thing I never fully grasped the reason for is that, in both games, there are eight levels split into two chunks, and dividing the chunks is a platforming section you can only beat by having maximum flight time. It's the cheapest upgrade, and for me, most of my playtime in the first game was because I was playing in Easterner Wingdings mode and assumed it was cheap because it was bad and not because it was important, and thus it took me a while to get across the chasm. After you've beaten all the main levels, you unlock a final level where you fight the final boss and win the game. Besides upgrades, you collect death screens, which is rough as it requires you to die to an enemy or stage hazard and then quit the level.

I never felt like I was failing a platforming or combat section because of the controls, which is the important thing. I often had a lot of trouble because of how finicky the weapons can be, but that's part of how they're balanced. There are various weapons and you can only hold one at a time, and they all have preset attack angles, so something like the axe, which can hit enemies multiple times per attack, isn't always the best option due to it being thrown a bit upwards, meaning you can't hit enemies unless they're either above you or very close. That gives a niche to the Holy Water, usually the worst weapon because its arc makes it hard to use against enemies who are too close or too far. But there's a catch, the best weapons are ones that disappear on contact with the enemy, since whether you can attack or not is dependent on how many instances of your projectile are on-screen and that means that close-range enemies can be hit as fast as you can hit the fire button. Ironically, the powerups that give you superior versions make those weapons weaker by giving them piercing, making them unspammable and lowering your dps severely. That kind of thing never necessary though.

The enemies and environments are varied and in both games the graphics are both clear and attractive. The sound effects were sometimes cliche but never problematic. I won't deny the first game is fun and the second game is better in nearly every respect.

The downside is that, as mentioned, getting the ryona content is not great. I think the games have an H-patch I didn't get, there was mosaic censoring and black bars in the death screens. On top of that, something the whole series follows is that there's a wide variety of ryona genres, but for most people I think that would mean that 80% of the content isn't for them. That's how it was for me. For every level or enemy or death screen focused on something I like, there were three that weren't. You can't have the hanging level without the petrification level AND tentacle rape level. I'm lucky that I'm so difficult to displease, if you have a strong reaction to ryona that isn't in your brand then these could be hard to play.

I can tell that my tastes in ryona are significantly different from most people's, which makes it hard for me to give a useful score. I'll take a guess. I'm not an action-platformer guy but I had fun for the few hours it took me to beat each of these.
Depravia 1 - 6/10
Depravia Egrigorl - 7/10