In
Virgin Island, you take control of Rifi, an adventurer girl who seeks out treasure as a way to make easy money. When this (admittedly stupid) get-rich-quick scheme fails and she ends up narrowly avoiding rape, Rifi gets thrown into a portal, through which she enters the temple of the Virgin Goddess, Nubera. When she awakens the sealed deity, Rifi somehow manages to strike a deal with her – the Goddess will grant her
any wish, provided Rifi can unite the shattered pieces of her mythical Virgin Lithograph and restore Nubera’s power. To aid Rifi in her quest, Nubera grants her The Iron Maiden, a mythical sword that gives her a host of magical abilities contingent on Rifi keeping her chastity.
The first thing that struck me about
Virgin Island during this prologue where Rifi meets the Goddess was its aesthetic. Now, RPGMaker games, even newer ones, are not known for being anywhere near pretty, and
Virgin Island does have some pretty sparse environments; however, when it tries, it pulls out all the stops and you’re treated to some
really decent 2D environments that, at least for me, inspired me with more than a little ’90s nostalgia. It brought to mind the period right before the start of the millennium, when 3D graphics were still awful but 2D graphics had finally been refined into something gorgeous. This nostalgic aesthetic carries over to the character spritework. Rifi, with her thick lines, round eyes with little highlighting, short bob cut and round, but somehow extremely firm-looking breasts is very,
very reminiscent of 90s anime.
Also, she really looks like another 90s-reminiscent-but-not-actually-90s sexy virgin.
Gameplay-wise,
Virgin Island is actually a really fun specimen in that there are two main, intertwining ways in which you interact with the game. The first is what people have come to expect from RPGMaker games – dungeon exploration, looting, and relatively primitive turn-based combats against a variety of enemies.
In this regard,
Virgin Island doesn’t break a lot of new ground compared to other H-games. You fight enemies in a you-go-they-go turn-based system, in which the participants take damage from skills and basic attacks. And yes, in some occasions you do get the standard H-game “bad” end, where losing can be a reward in itself because it unlocks a sex scene. The fights themselves also do their best to be titillating by including permanent damage to Rifi’s clothing – a tussle with an orc can leave you completely naked, which both makes you more vulnerable to subsequent enemies and also forces Rifi into the embarrassing scenario of turning up at the seamstress in her birthday suit. Overall, the combat is as good as it can be for a game constrained by RPG Maker’s engine limitations.
The other side of the coin when it comes to
Virgin Island’s gameplay is the chastity mechanic. Rifi’s magical sword, The Iron Maiden, only gives her powers while she remains a
vaginal virgin. That is to say that the Virgin Goddess’s support is entirely binary – have hymen, get magic. Don’t have hymen, even if you lost it through brutal, unwilling monster rape? No magic.
You as the player can handle this conundrum in a variety of ways, but you can’t
avoid it. In the character menu where you can consume items and manage equipment, you’ll find that Rifi has a “lewdness” stat that rises as the game goes on. The lewder she feels, the more of a need Rifi will have for release, and the looser her morals will get, pushing her further into degeneracy. You can embrace this fully, prostituting Rifi to random men, go halfway, having Rifi masturbate in public and offer blowjobs and titfucks (but not the
real thing) in exchange for money, or actively fight it, keeping both Rifi’s physical
and moral chastity intact against all odds. What you do will affect which scenes you run into, which characters you meet, and which endings you’ll unlock. In this regard,
Virgin Island really shines. It has 7 different endings and a
boatload of h-scenes. The h-scenes are rendered in proper VN format, of course, so you get actual porn and not just pixels fucking.
On the technical side of things,
Virgin Island is sadly as limited as you’d expect an RPG Maker game to be. You’re stuck on a single, small windowed resolution. A fullscreen mode is available when pressing alt+enter, but it does nothing but stretch out the textures, which looks awful. The soundtrack is compressed and made up of license-free music, but it’s serviceable at times and downright good in some boss fights and dungeons. The sound design is so-so. Rifi is voiced during combat and during some sex scenes (moans and screams, mostly), which is sexy, but otherwise sound-design consists mostly of canned sound effects.
All in all,
Virgin Island is about as good as you can expect an RPG Maker game to be on the technical and raw gameplay side of things, but what actually makes it worth recommending is that it’s
very good porn; the many h-scenes and how they relate to your handling of Rifi’s chastity mechanic give the game replay value and are pretty well made by themselves. I wholly recommend trying it, and if the turn-based gameplay isn’t to your taste, here’s a
save file with all H-scenes unlocked, courtesy of Hongfire.