After years I played it again yesterday, granted by far not through all the content.
Eventhough I like sandbox in general, here it is done in the worst way possible. The different quests depend on each other so despite being able to walk around freely I can still only do stuff in a hard order. Worse, some things can only happen at a specific time in the week so you have nothing else to do or discover but forward time over and over again.
Maybe it is planned to be fleshed out in the future? But this would need a huge amount of work. Imo the beginning was the best with the visual novel for the story and free roam moments that rewards looking around.
Normally I am quite tolerant to this in other games but here I really hate how much of a whipping boy we are. I liked to tell Elena to fuck off but then we are still forced to help her. She still tricks us, is rude and humilliates us but it is somehow shown as "bounding". I had hoped we could influenced how to play because the phone has a submissive / dominant status, does this change when progressing the story? Overall I dislike being forced to be such a simp for all the women but I guess it needs to happen for the story, still would have thought that the corruption tag allows us to be more dominant and self centered.
It is sad to see how little decisions we can make after the prolog, especially when dealing with other characters. When I find Rei again I can't really confront her, constantly I am forced to think that we actually liked it. Same when dealing with Elena, she is a bitch and asshole since the moment we meet her but still are forced to feel sorry for showing biased for mom / sister.
I had hoped we could get more than one path in how to deal with them.
Last, changing the relationship is a mess right now, be it wih incest patch or without. I noticed with the former it is a bit more consistent. Eventhough we can name the relationship in countless scenes it is again 'friends son', etc. Hope it will cleaned up in the future.
It is still a very high quality game and I will play it again in the (far far) future but I must say I am a bit dissapointed in the direction it went after all this time.
