I once saw some otaku girls who play otome games complaining: “In most galgames the heroine kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat, and in otome games the heroine also kicks the bucket at the drop of a hat. Man, male-oriented or female-oriented, the heroine always has it rough. You get used to it.” Thinking about it, that’s pretty much true. In a lot of stories women are painted as fragile things that need a man to protect them. Even the “senpai” type in galgames tends to get a later scene revealing she’s not actually that strong and is secretly fragile inside. It feels like something baked into the gender roles themselves. But every so often a game tries to change that. Sure, seeing the heroine carry the hero the whole way through in a male-oriented game is unrealistic. Everyone knows the protagonist is “the weakest” by default, and, well, by the end he’s always some broken-ass cheat character anyway. So all we can do is look at female-oriented games and see if any of them dare to make the heroine the strongest. So 断罪のマリア (Maria of Condemnation) might be one of those games. Not entirely, but it’s close — at the very least, the heroine’s combat power is the strongest in the game.