If Koikatsu didn't already exist, this would be worth at least 3 stars, but it does, and it's better than this in almost every conceivable way; even in its vanilla state, let alone with mods and expansions. I'm struggling to think of anything at all that Aicomi does better. If there's anything that made Koikatsu stand out from Illusion's other games at the time it's that it had a much greater variety of character dialogue. That's largely gone here, this is about at the same level of their other stuff. There's no more safe/risky days impacting sex dialogue, and girls have less to say both during sex and in general, and the fewer things they do say are pretty much said across every personality with none of the more flavorful lines you might hear in Koikatsu. In any case, this game is pretty clearly aimed at being a clone of Koikatsu under the new company, much like SVS was for AA2. But it does away with pretty much all the details that actually went toward selling the fantasy Koikatsu did. Just about the only good thing I can say about it is that Illusion's stock character designs have come a long way since then, but most people only seem to play their games to make their own characters anyway, so perhaps that's not worth much.
And everything that was underwhelming about Koikatsu either remains underwhelming here or was made worse. There's still that miserable stat progression system where you have to touch specific body parts for long enough to max it out (and you still only find out how much or little you accomplished after you close the scene), but somehow they made it even more tedious by splitting the touch interactions into a different scene that has to be separately initiated. You can only take girls back to your place to actually sleep with them after the second date with them now, instead of just going home with them after school. And it's not sufficient to just go out the first time to get it out of the way, you have to repeat this pointless first date routine for every single character you add. And like Koikatsu there's basically nothing to dates, and they are still limited to Sundays, which are as tedious to get to as before, requiring you to slowly skip through the whole week first. There's a new secondary type of date, festivals, that seem to work basically the same way, though I haven't managed to get one a second time yet, and like normal dates, the first one is a nothingburger. They do seem to have more interaction to them than normal dates, though I expect that it's nothing interesting.
I should also mention with respect to dates however that you have 4 options, each of which are unlocked via the one new game mechanic Aicomi includes, which is using conversation topics and activities with girls to nudge 3 bars which seem to indicate your own preferences towards the girls you're romancing. This system just amounts to pointless content gating, and the dialogue choices themselves disappear after you've finished nudging their respective bars toward the right positions. The only good thing I'll say about it is that for each girl, this system is completely one-and-done, no need to nudge the bars all over again if you start talking to a different girl and want to revisit a previous one, once you get them in the right places, you're locked in with her for good.
The performance is about the same as Koikatsu was 7 years ago... when I had a much lower spec PC. And I can't say the visual uplift is exactly significant. If anything, all the extra foliage dithering and LOD jank going on might have made Aicomi look worse than Koikatsu on the whole. That's par for the course when it comes to gaming in the 2020s though, I suppose
(V1.0, played in raw Japanese, which I can read well enough, no mods, maybe 5 or 6 hours of playtime)
