This is the thing; narrative and character inconsistencies. Aside from what the MC can do before that Cathy non-decision, it's also contradicted by the fact that he can then have casual trysts with as many as 3 other women in the very next episode when he's still with M&J.
It doesn't even seem to be about managing options but more about managing storylines to avoid lots of branching and/or to avoid issues where certain plot threads won't be compatible later on down the line, but it doing so it creates these seemingly inexplicable inconsistencies in other aspects of the game.
Controlling branches or avoiding incompatible paths down the line is exactly what I meant by managing options. As much as we want total flexibility, we all know there are going to be limits to what a VN can do. The question is really how those limitations are conveyed to the player, and that's where I agree BaDIK has been so frustrating at times.
Not all the time, certainly. I thought the Sage scene in Episode 5 worked very well despite the lack of choice: fuck buddies will automatically have sex with her, and players who didn't make out with her will automatically turn down her offer. That makes sense (the situation hasn't really changed since the last time the player made a choice), and the rationale is clearly conveyed to the player.
I'm also mostly on board with the way Jill is handled after her date; it makes some sense that an MC pursuing a girl like Jill would understand that rampant casual sex is eventually going to get in the way of courting Jill, and looking longingly at her polaroid is a good way to illustrate that thought process to the player. The problem is that the MC's monologue only addresses the main LIs when he berates himself for sleeping around; ongoing affairs with Jade or Envy aren't mentioned at all.* That makes for a very muddled setup.
It gets worse because of how uninterested the MC is in giving Maya & Josy the same respect. Yes, Maya insisted on no strings, but even her explanation made it pretty clear she expected those strings to happen if the throuple was meant to be. Yet we never see the MC think in those terms; he was very concerned about having to stop dating others, and when Maya proposes the setup the MC accepts immediately. It gives the impression that the MC is more serious about Jill than he is about Maya/Josy - which would be fine as an option, but is strange as automatic behavior.
I suspect I could live with arbitrary restrictions if DPC did a better job of explaining the MC's thought process.
*Come to think of it, I've never seen if Quinn would be mentioned if the MC had sex with her...
It's possible these roadblocks are being put in place to prevent incompatible plot points and storylines later on, but if that's the case I'd say that's pretty poor planning on DPC's part.
What they'd essentially be doing here, if this is the case, is saying that there's something about being able to pursue something with Cathy that interferes with the M&J path in such a major way that they, the dev, have to take away your ability to choose to take things further with Cathy because they either haven't figured out how to make it work on the M&J path or have elected not to make it work, whether this would work out good or bad.
In either case, I think it reflects very poorly on them as a dev because aside from the fact that even lesser quality, choice-based VNs are able to make multiple paths compatible with each other, even if that compatibility means there's a consequence for your earlier decisions and for being on different paths, it also creates narrative inconsistencies as we've seen where he has no problem plowing his way through several girls at the party and will have a threesome with 2 strippers, but draws the line at Cathy for some reason.
Maybe, but a lot of the other games I've played feel a less immersive in terms of those choices, too: either the MC just compartmentalizes everything (and events on one LI path rarely influences events on another), or they're just a harem game and the 'consequence' is getting extra LIs for free. Remember, we're mostly talking about side-girls. BaDIK has a relatively integrated story that doesn't really keep the side-girls contained to a given path.
Maybe this is simply a clumsy way of getting to a more compartmentalized setup? If so, it would be an interesting conundrum. A lot of the inconsistencies would go away if the MC automatically declined side-girl offers (or even other LIs) once he starts down a main LI path. I feel like it should be possible to explain the MC's decisions without too much extra development time, but it's possible I'm underestimating the work involved, or the degree to which these 'minor' discrepancies will interact in the future.
If that
is the case, would the game be better if the MC had to pick a main path early and only got to interact with a subset of side-girls based on that path? Or if each episode took another 1-2 months of development to handle all the combinations explicitly? Probably not, much as I don't like admitting it.
