Well... I finally worked my way through this monster of a thing, not including the shota and bestiality DLCs, which I'm not sure if I'll bother with. It was an... interesting ride, one that was both impressive and disappointing at the same time in a number of ways. My opinion about the True Ending hasn't changed. It still feels like the absolute lamest bit of content in the game, and it still feels like nothing of value would be lost if it was removed... however, it's existence and form makes a lot more sense and is a lot more acceptable once the true nature of this behemoth becomes clear.
This is not a game. This is a Visual Novel made in an RPGM version that is pretty much completely terrible for VNs. Especially since their attempt to give this thing mouse support is awful.
Now, it's not the first time I've seen a poorly made VN in RPGM... but it feels worse here because the whole thing starts in a way that makes you think that it might be an actual game, what with the introduction to the stats and all that jazz. However, those stats end up being mostly pointless. Morality is barely utilized. Charm is essentially never utilized outside of the train molester events as far as I can tell. Lust is never utilized at all, there are no events that requite a certain amount of lust and no interactions that raise or lower lust as days or time slots in days pass. Likewise, there are no events where Ayame can't refuse simply because her lust is too high or anything of that sort. Lastly, Robert's Trust is entirely useless, there's no effect to lowering it, and, unless I'm missing something, you can't lower it to zero anyway.
Furthermore, this thing has a massive map that's terribly under-utilized and feels extremely pointless a lot of the time... assuming you even have access to it, because you won't if you go into the Family Route or Clarke's route or Garcia's route. Even if you don't, there are almost no repeatable events or encounters. There's three repeatable events, if I'm not mistaken, and that's it, nothing else... That's leaving aside that said events require Ayame to reach the so called "Fallen State", which, for all that it's hyped up, it still leads to a lot of scenes where she's behaving more or less the same as before in terms of how she talks with whoever's fucking her at time.
On top of that, the Fallen State is only achievable by progressing through the main route(s).... Which feels even worse when, during Free Roam, you can actually lower Ayame's morality to Zero... and that doesn't trigger the Fallen State. Nothing does except going deep enough in the right routes.
Clearly, the intent was there, at some point, to make this into a game rather than an events collector with a variety of mini-stories. However, somewhere along the line, the skeleton that was put in place to support actual gameplay was abandoned in favor of content, content and moar content... Which makes the impressive amount of content that this game has into both a good thing as well as a bad thing. After all, as a game, this is worse than those Acerola NTR games, where at least all the stats work and do things and are not just there purely for show.
The amount of content in this game, and the focus on it, means that the focus was on keeping each storyline consistent with itself, rather than any interactivity between them, which is easy to see with all the route locks and lack of interaction between routes for the most part.
My last complaint, on the more subjective side of things... is that while this thing has a lot of stories... They're all too short. Ayame's fall from innocent, ignorant fiancée into total cock-addict is way too quick regardless of which route you take. It's made to feel even faster with how the story mostly tells us that Ayame is "fucked all night long until morning" and other such things, rather than showing us that she's being fucked all night long until morning at least on some occasions. There's a reason why various forms of media took to at least using those sequences where there's, for example, a page with four panels or some such showing a girl getting fucked in the same room in 4 different positions, maybe with time-stamps and whatnot... and that's to show the marathon fucking, rather than just telling the reader that it happened.
Sure, the amount of sex scenes in this thing is quite impressive, and so is the fact that they basically never re-use CGs outside of those repeatable scenes that I mentioned earlier... but if you look beyond that, the stories around those sex scenes are often not as good as they could be.
And that's ignoring the various spelling mistakes and whatnot that pepper the text in various places.
Still.
I will give the devs props for some of the twists and turns they made in these stories. A number of endings took me completely by surprise. This is especially true because Ayame suffers from an extremely bad case of "Netorare FMC Syndrome". That is to say, she's very beautiful, but doesn't understand how beautiful she is. She's very sensitive, but hasn't had the chance to discover this about herself. She has nymphomaniac tendencies that she hasn't been awoken too yet, and which she doesn't know how to deal with once they're woken up. She's a masochist. She's also a size queen, though that last one isn't entirely insurmountable as long as the sex is good and plentiful enough. She's also extremely, and I do mean, EXTREMELY dumb, which is shown consistently in almost all the Routes.
All of these traits are used everywhere, with the only real exception being the Pub Mistress branch, and even there, it wasn't so much that she was that much smarter than in other routes, but more of a case of Melvin being an idiot who thought that a bitch can't bite back if you leave her enough room to do so. Plus, even her vindictive streak once she feels she's been wronged past a certain point is actually fairly consistent between the various routes.
Quite frankly, from my point of view after binging the various stories over the past almost week or so, Ayame feels like the most consistent character in this whole RPGM VN. So for all that the thing tells you at the start that it's Ayame who has "alternate selves", it feels more like the various characters around her have alternate selves. This is quite noticeable with Robert in some routes (especially the Townsend family ending) as well as Fujiko, though Jack suffers through this quite a bit too if you compare how he is in the Family route to his actions outside of it. It'd be better if her fall in the various story-lines was more detailed and drawn out... but I suppose it's decent enough.
Also, as I mentioned before, a number of endings took me completely by surprise and broke the mold of my expectations given the usual tropes of stories like this one. The Childhood Friends Love ending, the Hero Ending, the Townsend Family ending, the two Jack endings... all of those, especially the first two, felt like very good twists that broke the mold. The first one in particular I did NOT expect at all and in a lot of ways felt very satisfying to read. I'd actually played through the other line first, and was thinking that man, Fujiko and Sato deserve to go die in a fire... and whaddya know, the game itself delivered and they died in a fire, by Ayame's hand no less. It was amazing. Tragic, but amazing.
On the other hand, some endings were both quite predictable and very disappointing. The Office line ending felt like the biggest disappointment, both because the behavior of the antagonist was extremely predictable, but also because it ended in a cliffhanger that will likely remain unresolved forever. I'll give it props, however, for how fucked up it is given that Armand is Ayame's father and she fell in love with him. I already knew that because I'd played Sato's route before the office route, so the picture at the end wasn't a surprise... but it makes the lack of a continuation all the more disappointing. There's also the fact that a number of the endings just have a fairly hot ending CG (like the Father in Law ending), but don't have a proper scene to go with that CG, making said CG a lot less enjoyable, and a lot less "usable", if you know what I mean.
Also, I'm sorry, but the Melvin Secret ending? Yeah. You're not selling it to me. It was ridiculous.
All in all, while this thing is quite impressive... I feel like it had a bit too much focus on Quantity rather than Quality. Fewer but better developed story-lines would have been better. More interactivity between the storylines would have been better too, but that's so extremely rare and difficult to implement that I don't really blame anyone for not trying to pull it off. At the end of the day, it's also a matter of taste rather than objective fact.
Lastly, I've seen mentions of a remake... and in this case, I feel like it's definitely warranted. This RPGM engine is TERRIBLE for a VN... and that's exactly what Fleeting Iris is right now. Plus, the lack of proper mouse support hurts.
this is why I like fantasy/hentai games since, sometimes DEVs do use this route
