Video Game / Corruption of Laetitia

Corruption of Laetitia is a 2019 freeware, Yuri, RPG Maker game developed by Kayako Amaya. It can be downloaded here.

The protagonist, Celeste Avadona, is a half-angel Valkyrie who was raised by the Elysian clergy to fight the demons overrunning the world of Laetitia. She and her paladin allies eventually storm the Ramarian Keep and defeat the Demon Lord, allowing them to choke the demons' main access point to the mortal realm. But this victory is short-lived, as Cardinal Alfredus Marian betrays Celeste and prepares to sacrifice her to steal her divine power. Before Celeste is killed, the Demon Lord, Malayna Erundar, offers to turn her into a demon in order to save her life, to which Celeste accepts. Joined by defecting priestess Riliane d'Elphegort and succubus Gaia Grune, Celeste must work with her former foes in order to end Marian and the Elysian Order's reign over the nations of Elphegort and Eidelwalt. And in the process, she may just fall in love with one of her allies...

The main gimmick of the game is the use of a Karma Meter. You can make various choices to either increase or decrease your corruption, which will have an effect on how the story progresses. Lessening corruption will allow you to complete a series of sidequests and gain powerful items, while increasing corruption gives you more soul essence, which can be traded for more attacks and units for the Strategy RPG sections. Or you can choose to be neutral and keep your corruption level where it is.

Compare to Luxaren Allure, another Yuri RPG staring four women on a quest to defeat an Evil Overlord.

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Corruption of Laetitia provides examples of:

• A Taste of Power: For the first dungeon, you play as a powerful Valkyrie who has attacks that can hit up to 1000 hp and a healing spell that heals you completely. Upon beating the first dungeon, Celeste is betrayed by Alfredus Marian and uses up her powers against his men, causing her to revert to level 1.
• Big Bad: Cardinal Alfredus Marian starts the game by betraying the heroine and stealing her powers as part of his plans to bring order to the two countries he has influence over. He's also responsible for starting an industrial revolution for the sake of bolstering his military power, but ignores the environmental damage he causes to both his own people and various monster races, making his downfall the main goal of the game.
• But Thou Must!: Averted. The game doesn't yank your chain when it gives you a decision - if you say you want to refuse someone's help or kill a potential ally, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. The only case where this applies is in the beginning, where refusing Malayna's help will get you killed.
• Call to Agriculture: Celeste retires to a farm if she ends the game with low corruption.
• Cast Full of Gay: Most of the major characters are female, including nearly all of the monsters, and they all want a piece of Celeste. Even Celeste's parents were two women.
• Corrupt Church: The Elysian Order is run by Alfredus Marian and supports his paranoid and militaristic policies with no regard to the environment. They also want to go to war with the demons and are unwilling to negotiate. An update extends the endings and reveals that in the light route, Celeste, Riliane, and Aeria reform the order into a Saintly Church that promotes coexistence with the demons and monster tribes.
• Cult: There's a mysterious cult of cloaked figures who are publicly unaffiliated with the Elysian order, but they're being manipulated by Marian to protect a demon-weakening stone. One of them suicide bombs a bridge to prevent the party from getting to Ostburg due to his hero worship of Marian. They are also responsible for killing Celeste's human mother and Riliane's mother, and this is implied to be part of Marian's agenda.
• Cute Monster Girl: The factions the player can recruit include slimes (the stronger of which look like humanoid girls), Girtablilu, Harpies, and Alraune. The latter three groups have only girls.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Being corrupt is not quite the same as being evil. Both Malayna and Gaia embraced corruption and became demons for good reason (though Malayna isn't entirely good, either) and it's the demons' job to protect the world from the shades of the damned, something the angels don't thank them for. Likewise, Celeste took Malayna's deal to save herself and fight back against Marian.
• Dynamic Difficulty: The developer acknowledges that Celeste's classes aren't equally powerful, especially in solo fights. The Final Boss fight with Marian actually becomes easier if Celeste is still in one of her starter classes, since Marian is overconfident from the power difference. However, if Celeste regains her original class or gains a similarly powerful dark equivalent, Marian will bring out his full power. In the former case, Marian will also forgo light magic in favor of other elements, since he knows Celeste will just resist it.
• Emergency Transformation: Malayna rescues Celeste from being sacrificed by transforming her into a demon at the last second.
• Everyone Has Standards: In the Arowar siege battle, the Elysian soldiers will comply if Celeste demands that they order the civilians into the safety of their homes, despite being her enemy.
• God's Hands Are Tied: Arch-Angels are not allowed to directly interfere with human affairs and those who do so are punished with either chains or being exiled to the Abyss.
• Good All Along: Downplayed because the Arch-Demons sometimes suggest morally gray actions to Celeste. They were once Arch-Angels who took the vessels of sin into themselves in order to save humanity. While these sins tend to influence their psyche negatively, the Arch-Demons are still responsible for containing the souls of the damned in the Abyss so that they don't overrun the mortal world. At the start of the game, Celeste doesn't know that and instead sees them as threats.
• Got Me Doing It: At one point, Riliane takes on Celeste's Pungeon Master antics:
  This reminds me of Celeste. She would made pun of this barrel.
  
  Damn, she's rubbed off on me.
• Green Aesop: Many of the human citizens, as well as various monster species, are finding the land unlivable because of Marian's industrial revolution polluting the environment. Some of the monster species will join the player both to take care of their immediate environmental issues and to stop Marian's destruction of their ecosystem.
• Guide Dang It!: Finding the last two books, "Daughter of Evil" and "Rin's Diary," is difficult because the former is hidden behind a hard-to-see passage while the latter depends on the first one being found and shown to a certain NPC.
• Healer Signs On Early: Riliane is there to witness Marian's attempt to sacrifice Celeste and gets caught in the explosive fallout that ensues when Celeste accepts Malayna's aid. Thus, she can be recruited literally within seconds of regaining control of Celeste.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a clock that can be viewed with the pocketwatch item. The time affects the appearance of NPCs in towns and ghouls in Arowar's cemetery.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: If the party is overleveled against a non-boss foe, that foe has a chance of running away. This effectively serves as Anti-Grinding to prevent them from getting overleveled for the next story boss, since foes won't give EXP if they flee.
• La Résistance: Celeste forms a coalition with the demons, Savia village, and several monster species in order to oppose the Elysian church's rule over Elphegort and Eidelwalt.
• Light Is Not Good: Multiple:
  • Marian is the strongest light magic user in existence and the Big Bad. This is a cheat: he stole his magic from Celeste, he didn't develop it himself.
  • The angels have a very skewed view of good and evil, considering demons, fallen angels, and any angel who breaks the rules to be evil and demanding torture or destruction. Celeste's final test to return to angelhood is to defend the imprisoned and tortured Archangel Aeria from her own kind, and fighting her fellow angels cleanses her of corruption. This seriously perplexes the angels. Additionally, it's implied that the angels passed their anti-demon views to the Elysian Church, making them the Greater-Scope Villain for inspiring Marian's beliefs.
• Mars Needs Women: Most monster races reproduce using humans (of either gender) as some kind of incubator.
• Nonstandard Game Over: If the player refuses to take Malayna's offer to become a demon, Marian's ritual succeeds and Celeste dies. Before the game over screen, one of the cloaked followers, Riliane, will express regret at not being able to save Celeste, hinting that she can become an ally if the player chooses to survive.
• Numerical Hard: This game has the idiosyncratically named difficulties Playground (easy), Garden of Eden (original difficulty in older versions of the game), and Hellish Yard (hard), which all affect enemy stats and luck.
• Our Gods Are Different: Celestial Paragons and Archangels fill the role of deities. If Celeste advances high enough in the Tower, she can pray to her mother in battle, getting all kinds of healing and buffing.
• Permanently Missable Content: Multiple:
  • There are some one-time dungeons in this game, such as the hallway created by Malayna's deadly sins and the Tower of Revelation, meaning the player only has one chance to grab the items inside.
  • Arowar and the nearby marsh are mutually exclusive locations, and choosing to go to one locks the player out of the other. It's also possible to lose several sidequests in Arowar if the player chooses to raze it rather than avoid civilian casualties.
• [Popular Saying], But...:
  Celeste: Sticks and stones may break my bones but the words on these pages break my mind.
• Pre-existing Encounters: All encounters are symbol encounters, though if the player already allied with the faction the enemy belongs to, they won't initiate a fight upon contact and will even let the player walk through them. They also won't respawn if the player defeats them while sufficiently overleveled.
• Press X to Not Die: In order to tame the sin of Gluttony, the player has to offer a steak dinner on a plate. If the player doesn't press the examine key to dodge in time, Celeste will be eaten along with the steak.
• Sheathe Your Sword: To pass the first trial in the Forgotten Tower, Celeste must fight a light version of herself in a Duel Boss fight. The only way to win is to guard and heal until Light!Celeste states that the real Celeste passes. Attacking will eventually result in Light!Celeste using a One-Hit Kill skill.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the first dungeon, one of the books you can find is titled "the combustible properties of lemons".
  • In the next dungeon, checking a barrel will cause Malayna to remark "Do a barrel roll!"
  • One of the achievements is called P.S. I Love You, and another is called The Devil is a Part-Timer!
  • One of the guards in Savia village says "I used to be an adven.. ...Never kind my life story."
  • In Yua Temple B2, Riliane will say "This isn't regular darkness... it's ADVANCED darkness."
• Tank Goodness: In the final tactical RPG battle, Celeste will hijack a tank and use it to break into Ostburg and interrupt Marian's wedding. As a controllable unit, it can deal AOE damage and must be escorted to the castle to progress. Unfortunately, it breaks down once it reaches the castle entrance.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: There are all sorts of actions that player can take to increase their corruption level, but many of these means losing out on potential allies (including the only early-game healer) or possibly having to fight them, requiring the player to adopt a mindset of Pragmatic Villainy to raise their corruption without shooting themselves in the foot. For example...
  • The player can execute a kidnapped little girl. Riliane, if present, will immediately attack you, convinced you are definitely no longer the same hero she once idolized.
  • There is the option to burn a town rather than conquer it in a tactics minigame. While burning the town takes less effort and allows the player to loot dead bodies for souls, doing so locks them out of the town's stores and sidequests.
• Wedding Smashers: Marian attempts to marry Katarina Marlon for political purposes, but Celeste and her allies crash the ceremony and kill him.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The credits and collectible books make no secret that the setting is based on various Vocaloid songs, such as "Daughter of Evil" and "Boss Death." Some of the dialogue quotes the songs word for word.
• The X of Y: Laetitia is the world the story takes place in, and well, it's has corruption.
• Yuri Genre: The main party members, who are all women, have Relationship Values with Celeste that can be increased through story and optional events. If one of these values is high enough at the end of the game, the epilogue will show Celeste getting married to that character.

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