Well, I just spent about 4 hours playing this. Frankly it's a mess.
The big problem with it is that the game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. Let's be clear, this is a slice of life anime style visual novel with almost no elements of sandbox gameplay within it. There doesn't seem to be any repeatable scenes (I played 14/24 chapters) in sandbox mode and how the sandbox feature works is that you move to a new location then it plays the VN part then you move to another location and it plays a different VN part. There are no choices to be made. The characters don't have a "schedule" so to speak, they live where they need to live for the next piece of the VN and that's it.
Also, the game is called "Absolute Domination" and it presents itself as a game about corruption and/or domination but that only kicks in in chapter 14 and again there's no reward for the exploration that you've been doing. There's the huge grind/build up then the payoff is.... another VN cut into segments for you to trigger with no agency to it.
This is a very long and complicated story with lots of interchangeable characters who don't seem to exist in any world outside talking to the MC. The MC doesn't seem to be a person and is instead a vessel, which is perfectly fine and even encouraged in a sandbox game but this isn't a sandbox game. Tbh I started just skipping the dialogue after the first 10 or so chapters/hours because nothing was happening.
And when I say nothing was happening then we need to talk about the pacing of this game. It's slow. Not slow as in a grindy type of game, slow as in continental drift or travelling to another Solar System. The first sex scene is in chapter 7 and its a throwaway one. The second is in chapter 9 or so and it's a "here's a prostitute all of a sudden" encounter. Again, none of these are repeatable nor change your interactions with the characters.
I think the dev needs to really sit and think with what they're trying to achieve here in terms of what is the exact genre and play style of what they want to produce as it's all over the place. There's obviously a lot of hard work gone into this, but it's unfocused. This dev reminds me of one of those massively excessive filmmakers who try to put 20 different story threads in their film and desperately need and editor to focus them onto a few different things that they do well. If it's a sandbox then focus on that and make it interactive instead of chunks of VN. Build the world. If it's a VN then abandon the sandbox. If it's about the trials and tribulations of a school in Japan then make it about that. If it's about a young man who gets dominant superpowers and takes out his frustration then make it about that. Arguably, the MC doesn't actually have that many issues at school. Before he gets his powers, he's smart, well liked, gainfully employed and already had sex with several women including his girlfriend.
There's a process in lots of forms of development called "deletion therapy" (or other similar phrasing). What it means, is that you've now built a project that was full of different ideas and content and designs and it's all gone a bit out of control. So instead what you do is stop adding content, stop changing content. You delete it. You make it the smallest you can while retaining the vision of your design. So you delete the sandbox or the VN path. You delete a location or a character. Why is there a mall, a market, and several other hub locations? Why isn't there just one commercial location like a mall with various shops in it? Things like this. Make it smaller and more focused before you expand.
And if you choose to go down the sandbox route then there has to be an alive world with characters and things outside the main VN. You open up locations for a scene and then they're empty until the next scene. You have a ton of characters, move them around at different times. Repeatable scenes, changeable relationships. Why can I have sex with a woman once and then when I meet them the only option is to flirt?
The core theme of the game seems to be domination given it's in the title. Then you need to introduce this a lot sooner. Or you need to make the MCs life more unbearable. But either way, without interactive choices then it's still going to be a VN.
Oh and there's never any moment I'll ever play this game without changing "pause 6.0" to pause "0.1" because it's quicker for me to do that than watch the opening intro. 6 seconds each frame when there's 5 or 6 of them is oppressive and I'll just skip it which presumably is against the whole point.
