Well, it finally happened. I was wrong, and the dev did something that didn't follow my prejudices of him.
GENERAL REVIEW
Overall, I very much enjoyed the change in direction of this update. People are griping about major events, and I'll get to that in the next section, but many small dialogue tweaks were made that those of us who've paid care attention to the game from the start probably noticed.
When you're in the bar with Steph on friday night, the tone of the conversation is decidedly more amicable, even in low confidence paths it 'feels' less confrontation and contentious, and more like an actual married talking. I particularly liked the emphasis on "we're doing this for us" regardless of path taken. Steph feels like a partner in crime, not an adversary, and I genuinely enjoyed trying all the paths; threesome push vs gina foursome vs train vs sesex.
This change in tone continues throughout Saturday, and even better, it seems like there's either a confidence or var reset, or a less punitive threshold - meaning you can come out of friday night from the train scene, and still get the saturday Amber and Paul stuff, or vice versa. This is great in my mind, as it gives the player more options for replayability and mixing and matching options.
Tori's first house visit is similar flowwise, yet the conversation as been tweaked like above to make everything more amicable and less ntr-ish. Even on the dom1=1/dom1=3 paths, Steph is regularly checking in with MC while she's with Jason. Really the only remnant that remains from the old version's tonality is the dom1=2 path, basically the 'ntr' path, yet I still got a chuckle there from the dialogue when Tori gets uncomfortable and MC is like 'nah it's fine lol' <-- this was a reversal of the usual trope.
REACTION TO OTHERS REVIEW
Frankly, I've no idea what others are talking about when they criticize this release. Have they even played all the paths? People are saying things like 'now it's a boring vanilla game where Steph can't sleep around'.. uhhh literally the only time she doesn't have a chance for her own fun is at the very end during Tori house visit. That's 1 out of 4 major events where Steph doesnt have an opportunity for extramarital dick. (FriNight/SatMorn Donny, Sat night paul, Sunday Jason). That hardly sounds like a boring monogamous vanilla game.
I'll concede it feels a little forced where if you push Steph to do stuff with a guy while you're at Tori's, the game stops that dead in its tracks, but I'd chalk this more up to unfinished content rather than the final flow. Again, considering the context of how many events are available for Steph, not the end of the world.
OTHER THOUGHTS
While the dialogue changes were great, I was a little disappointed that the bulk of updated animation content was for Sunday-(tori fuck was good, I'm talking about animation revisions). The 'updated' donny and steph stuff was mostly reused screens, same with mc+steph or gina or paul.
Bluntly, the dev's favorite still seems to be Jason. I hate Jason. He's ugly, he's not charming or witty, and his scenes just fall flat for me. Swap him out with an attractive guy, hell, black, white, whatever, just someone who has more chemistry with Steph and actually makes for hot sex scenes on sunday instead of this mr clean mofo.
