visual novels are a clickfest to the next cgi sex scene, atleast in a sandbox it plays like an actual game where it has gameplay features and segments it feels like im actually a part of the world and story
Well it might be gameplay but most sandboxes are usually just grinding points or chasing events (sometimes even random). Not exactly prime gameplay there. I'd much rather have a streamlined story I can follow with some diverging decisions, even if miniscule, than some tacked together h events.
The problems most sandboxes have is that they cannot, by definition, really tell a coherent story. As I could meet and romance character Y before even touching upon character X, even if it's meant to be a different order by the author. And if they
DO follow a specific order of events, it just feels super cheap because why tack on a sandbox if the order of events is fixed.
Maybe some of them can learn something from a story structure like the newer Zelda generation. But I wouldn't care either way because as soon as I see affection points or similar, I'm out lol.