No amount of new updates is going to fix that though. Its because of the decision Luxee made that the game's concept is looking back from the future at specific memories from the MC's past. So we get certain scenes, but little to no build up for them so they don't have much impact. We don't get a feel for the love interests or get to see them as fully fleshed out individuals. Most are just fetishes wrapped in flesh. So for the loli sister or the loli asian or other love interests we have sudden escalations of nudes being sent and things like that, but not a good feel for why it is all happening or why we should honestly care. Future updates will just jump us ahead in the relationships without the context that would actually give the scenes we did see any meaning.
I applaud Luxee for trying new things with this game and just not trying to make a game identical to PL. Except PL was a much better game, even at "only" six updates in. The things Luxee chose to do differently in this game just aren't working, like the memory thing, or the sandbox, trying to blend Nea's story with a harem game, or any number of other things. There's an awful lot of valid criticism that sometimes gets overshadowed by the occasional blatant transphobism or gets lumped in with it unfairly. On the other hand, the main praise I see for the game time and again is literally just "Nea is cute". I think most of those people would be just as content with a slideshow showing different increasingly lewd renders of Nea or just a simple visual novel. Luxee could have knocked that out pretty quickly. Except Luxee wanted this game to be something that could be as popular and lucrative as PL was, and they'll get zero shade from me on that. Money to do something you like is good. What I will throw shade at is all of the bad choices they made to get us to this point and their increasing lack of engagement with the game and their supporters. I was one of those paid supporters for most of PL and the first few updates of A69, and at this point I regret spending any money on this game because my support of it was based on promises Luxee hasn't kept, and what I was given just wasn't anywhere near the same quality as what I'd come to expect from Luxee.
This game could've worked just as well, if not better, if it was a traditional VN. Credit to Lux for trying something new, but as its been mentioned, it's not working, and the bond with the characters players tend to make isn't easily built with the "memories" option and the fact you can't do many events unless a certain character's event chain has been advanced, one of my
BIGGEST gripes about this game. If it was a regular VN, none of that "central character" dependency would be needed and this game wouldn't take as much heat as its gotten.
With PL, you got to see step-by-step day-by-day building of relationships, from nearly perfect strangers in a sense all the way to the endings. The bonds and connections were formed with the players liking whoever they liked. It was much easier and smoother from a story point of view too rather than, as its also been said, sudden nudes being sent over the phone. I would much rather have "SEEING" the relationship build with the MC and girls like Evie or Tess rather than these supposed flashbacks. I said it MANY months ago, if I was Pete (the guy this MC was talking to in the very beginning) listening to this story, I would've shot myself, I mean, whoever the MC was with was in the bathroom right? What the hell is she doing in there that would take THIS LONG for her to come back from?
I absolutely
adore PL (I'm even playing it now as I write this, and I'm even writing a novel blending PL & A69 worlds and certain girls) and I want so much for A69 to succeed, but I don't think it's going to do as well as PL because of the methods the game is built around. I financially support Luxee, follow his Twitter, SubStar, am on DISCORD day and night just waiting for something to be dropped or mentioned, and it's been radio silence this whole time.
A69 was an attempt at a sandbox type game (like Harem Hotel or Lessons in Love) but with it rotating around a single character or having that central dependency isn't working as well as thought possible. A traditional VN would've been just fine in my opinion. There are a few girls in this game I adore, but as it sits, the "character bond" I feel for them isn't as strong as when I played PL for the first time and was immediately locked on to Ada and Elly (and later Sofi)
Just my two cents.
