>>100805
Graveyard Executioner is different from the past two entries but not in any major way. You still go from level to level doing action platforming and getting money to upgrade yourself while watching women and the occasional shota get tortured and/or raped in the background. So what's new?

There are now human enemies, and which weapon you use affects how they get taken apart. Weapons are now distinguished not by their attack patterns but by their ease of use, with weapons with faster swing speeds also having less DPS and stun chance. You might see an issue with how those two facts interact, I'll talk about it later. Melee and combos are a bigger focus now, half your arsenal is melee. Rather than upgrading your stats generically, you upgrade your weapons specifically. Rather than having a set number of hits you can take, you now have an HP pool, and rather than using chaos orbs to restore health and pass difficult sections, you use potions that restore X-percent of that health. If a human enemy is low on health, you have two dogs in your back pocket you can attack them with, trapping the enemy in a torture device with military utility that you can summon at any time. Finally, instead of playing through the first levels in any order until you're upgraded enough to reach the second levels, you replay the entire game linearly multiple times using new abilities to unlock different paths. It's not really a metroidvania since you can't go backwards and the abilities you get to unlock new regions are usually just some esoteric form of colored key, but it lends some new dimensions to the map.

So now you're not just seeing ryona when you lose, but when you win, too. And it's more narrative and less freeform. And the graphics are better once again. And the weapon system is a net positive. And I played this one in English so I knew what was going on (you're not missing a huge amount if you don't but there's SOME stuff worth reading). I'll say outright that this is the best of the trio and is getting an 9/10, although I'm guessing since, as mentioned, my tastes are an outlier.

But there's some issues.

Whacking girl's heads off with the crowbar was arousing. For me, mashing them into paste with the giant sword wasn't. But the crowbar was also the easy-mode weapon with low DPS and high attack speed, and the giant sword was the hard-mode one and was the other way around. Every time you reach the end of the game and get sent back, you don't just unlock a new path, you are playing on a higher difficulty, enemies do more damage and have more health and tougher ones appear earlier. The crowbar ran out of potential before the enemies ran out of health. I had to upgrade to the mid-level melee weapon, the shovel, because I couldn't get the hang of the sword, and I had a rough time in the later sections because I was playing sub-optimally. In essence, when you get to the first shop, you should see which weapon is the most expensive for melee/ranged and just use that one, because anything else isn't as efficient even if you like the ryona content more.

The traps you get from attacking enemies with dogs are a good way of letting the player express themselves in theory. In practice, you'll try each one once, find which two best solve issues you don't want to deal with yourself, and never touch the system again. Besides the cooldown, there's no limit to how often you can use a girl once they're in a trap. Most enemies appear in the first run, they just become more common on higher difficulties, so I spent 2/3rds of the game with the same two traps, never experimenting.

Something introduced in Depravia 2 was activated ryona. When you pass a certain point, a background ryona element starts doing something and you get to watch it unfold rather than just seeing the before or after. This was used in two levels. Graveyard Executioner develops on this by allowing you to take an even more active role, striking the element in question to set it off. Once again, this is used precisely twice. I only found the first one across all three playthroughs, I'm taking the animation viewer's word for it that there's a second one. That just confuses me since those were my favorite parts. It doesn't make sense for our elf-girl to take time out of avenging her kingdom by dropping a captured former comrade into a pot to boil alive while she watches, but it was ryona where I wasn't under some sort of pressure. I don't think it counts as a downside that a game didn't do enough of a good side-thing, but it's odd to me.

There's also minigames, another thing introduced in Depravia 2, but these were expanded on. They're an interesting diversion, and although the gameplay loop is at its most interesting, the story is also at its longest, and the breaks are nice. If I had a nickel for every time a ryona action/platformer turned into a shmup, I'd have two nickels, which confuses me.

This is also the most boobalicious game of the trio since the new protagonist is a lot more shameless, and has no issues with losing a bunch of her clothes to combat damage. I support this, although something about the bodytypes in this game makes everyone look misshapen to me. YMMV, I guess. Same with the bad-end ryona, now there are in-engine cutscenes for your deaths, but it's still a very wide variety. I hope you like rape, since that's the most popular genre by far. Your character can decapitate anyone she comes across, but she herself can't become a head shorter.

Overall, it's the best in the series. It's the longest and has content to match. If you're into general ryona and don't mind using both hands to play the game while it happens for the most part, there's no substitute. 9/10.