I played all the paths of Ep10. Here is my opinion about it. (It does not contain any real SPOILER)
TL;DR: a delusion if we consider one year development. There is a lot of content, just missing the focus.
-- EP 10 THE REVIEW --
Frankly a disappointment, taking into account that expectations set by DPC were high and a year has passed since Episode 9.
There is a lot of content produced, it's true, but most of it is not related to the story (various tests, minigames). The SFW animations are to be forgotten, the NSFW ones at least are justifiable by the context, even if the quality is necessarily mediocre (we can't ask him for more, it's not his specialization). A mediocre animation at 60fps is still mediocre animation.
The sex scenes are very few, totally insufficient. Just 16 (including three of Madame, seriously?) for a year of development, with over 5000 images produced, means losing the focus of the VN a bit. No, this is not a literary masterpiece nor a prize-winning novel, nor an action videogame, it is still a pornographic Visual Novel whose center should be sex and eroticism, immersed in an engaging story.
They seem as something put there because it has to be there, the minimum required to feed the players desire. But there are no surprises, except the negative ones: the disproportionate attention given to Madame, the absence of any scene with the three girls sleeping in MC's bed. The rest is all predictable, the routine scenes with the main girls, the bare minumum extra, with composition and lighting from gonzo films, and that's it.
The eroticism is so sparse and impalpable that it doesn't even emerge in the sex scenes, which all seem very mechanical and very simplified. Whichever option one chooses, no trace remains of it. There are no ramifications or surprises, all scenes are a selection of positions, after two positions MC can ejaculate. He looks like a robot. The girls' level of satisfaction is not influenced or taken into consideration in the slightest, a very phallocentric and infantile conception of sex. The dialogues are reduced to the bare bones and the eroticism is zero. DPC really needs a female writer help with dialogue during sex scenes.
Renderings are often poorly posed. But this has never been a problem for BaD because most users don't even notice these aspects. The phenomenon of clothes flying a few centimeters above girls' skin is now taken for granted. But the deformity caused by Heather's breasts in most of the scenes had to be corrected, that ones are really unwatchable, beyond the already low standards we are used to.
Minigames have become a plague, a useless duty to pay with waste of time and curses. For each path you have to spend too much time solving tests or fighting fights that have nothing to do with the plot and actually distract from the VN, annoyingly interrupting the flow of the narrative. If at least they were avoidable individually (no, starting the game from the beginning and disabling them is not a viable option). Some minigames (party planning or others integrated into the plot) make sense, others just seem like the derailment of its creator's ego.
I would tell DPC to spend less time creating minigames and pay more attention to details in image rendering, in dialogues, in sex scenes. Obviously no one can make these criticisms of him otherwise he will be banned from his server, so he thinks everyone loves the direction his VN has taken.
