Caught up with the recent material. There's some really great stuff in here; I know that getting all those mall scenes done must have been an absolute slog, but going shopping with mom and little sister in particular had some much needed focus. There's been a whole lot of "okay, we'll talk about this/do something about this later" sprinkled throughout and actually reaching a point in the story where the family wants to come together and figure this out feels good to read because it was becoming increasingly necessary within the story. I half-expected mom to go cuss out ~madame Serena~ for being so grossly irresponsible during the scene where you can tell her about the curse. In fact I'm still kinda hoping for that.
Same with introducing some stakes with the principal taking a realistically awful stance. With this setting it needed to examine the consequences of what's been happening from more than a personal perspective and introduce some real obstacles to overcome. So far it's kinda been cheesing a number of things with all the isekai cheat-level competency stuff; for the story to feel like it has any weight it's got to have some problems that can't be immediately trivialized.
I'm also a big fan of the other witch who took the exact opposite stance from all the other magical characters because she's actually been there. That's where the game's oldest problems start to crop up, though. I noticed that there comes a point where the story starts to have a harsh split that works against its own messaging. We'll have a scene with this character telling us "all these people who keep trying to force feed you their answers are full of it; whatever -you- decide is right and it can be as messy as you want" only for the game to decide what the main character's attitude is based solely on the transgender stat. Or maybe it's actually just the single choice of whether to accept or reject The Girl; I haven't tested that yet. The way the story and game are structured communicates that it's not conceiving of any answers as to what the curse is about other than the obvious one despite the text of the story wanting to communicate that this is not the only valid one.
If the main character's acceptance or rejection of everything only boils down to this one stat, what are the femininity/masculinity and acceptance/resistance measures even doing? It -looks- like you could build all kinds of characters, and I tried because I wanted to see what all it would take into account, but having high fem and acceptance but little or nothing in the trans stat results in scenes where the main character talks like he unilaterally hates all of this. Many of the choices are structured with three basic attitude archetypes (resistant, mixed, accepting/enthusiastic) but once it reaches this harsh divide it reads like it really only supports two character types: definitely trans Ethan and wants nothing to do with this Ethan.
It's...very awkward. I spotted this conflict in the structure of the story pretty early and it's only grown more pronounced. It'd be a lot more polished if it was more of an on-rails transgender game, but that would eat away at its charm. I can tell you really want it to be accommodating, but the story is always feeling friction between letting the player control the level of engagement and following the beats of a forced transformation game. Earlier I thought making adjustments so that the structure and the message agree more would be the way to go, but it's so deep in there now that I think it's just part of the game's identity.
My advice for how to deal with it now is to focus on smoothing away this rough divide that can make a player feel like the character they've built so far is being taken away from them and replaced with a wet blanket who now wants nothing to do with everything the player guided him into doing. Don't let that transgender stat be the only one that matters. In a game that's trying to be as open as this one and say the things that it wants to say, it shouldn't feel like it's outlandish or impossible for the main character to like wearing cute clothes or having a cute body while being cisgender or to actually be happy with rather than anxious about looking and acting androgynous. It pigeonholes a lot more than it wants to, I feel.
Here's an example: I was testing out what the game actually allows the player to do, so I kept Ethan somewhat feminine and had him mostly show interest in boys. He ended up just under the androgynous shift and I set him up to play Juliet. I very much enjoyed the reasoning that you came up with for him to want to do so and I was excited to see how he'd play that out - but then early ending. Not only that, one where he basically just decides that none of that stuff mattered and gets married to a woman.
That's the frustration of playing this game. You write some really interesting scenarios that aren't the main trans path where Ethan wants to play Juliet because girl. Wanting to play Romeo in a way that utilizes the androgyny of his body and feelings or Juliet because he doesn't feel that he needs to share her gender to understand her soul are things I really want to read! But if you're not playing the main character as trans the writing starts to assume that there's no other way the main character could possibly want to engage with what's happening to him.
You've got a lot of stat variables in play here. Let them play.
