There's too much to cover everything. To quickly sum up, you can see my original take
here.
shazba had a somewhat more positive take on a lot of those elements
here and
here.
Based on the rate of rate of time passing in the latest episodes (and the teaser of the mansion in Halloween regalia), I suspect the Halloween party is going to be the
first test of the MC's loyalty. That's a big part of why I've gone from eagerly anticipating it to wishing we'd skip it this year.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the MC shouldn't face temptation, just that I don't see the Halloween party as offering a particularly
effective temptation. I like all the LIs. If my MC just committed to one (or two) of them, self-destructive, drunken antics with someone I didn't choose is an easy pass. There's nothing worse than having to endure the MC agonizing over what should be an easy decision.
Sure, people who picked others deserve their fun. But by forcing us to commit to the choice, DPC upped the stakes. The Halloween party can't just be about sexy games anymore, which makes it feel like one of those WW2-era battleships that was obsolete the instant it hit the water. Maybe DPC will surprise me, but for now it feels like such a waste.
Something more might come of it eventually, but to date there's almost no difference. If you don't defend Chad, during the Episode 7 party he tells Alex the MC isn't worth it rather than saying the MC is cool.
That presumes that the man to whom Rusty sells his car owns (and/or founded) the dealership. Also, it's much more likely DPC is just reusing a model and the two characters are no more related than the MC and Tommy.
I don't think it's one or the other. For all the faults Episode 4 had resolving it, I think the twist of Josy showing up as Maya's surprise girlfriend was good for the game. Likewise I think the destruction of the mansion in Episode 5 was a good moment that hit hard and paved the way for the MC's rise to glory; hosting the Halloween party wouldn't feel nearly as satisfying if the audience didn't share the sense of how tough the path back has been.
Of course, the flipside to this is that we need lulls in the drama to appreciate what's been lost or gained. If everything is balls-to-the-wall drama all the time, it loses its impact. Nothing is at stake if any winnings will immediately be imperiled before we can spend them. No sense worrying about any particular crisis, it's business as usual.
DPC excels in the slice of life material and struggles with high-stakes threats, but his instincts to have both is correct. He just needs to learn that less is sometimes more. If he keeps the scale personal most of the time and saves his powder for a few pivotal moments, he can get an even bigger narrative bang without having to strongarm the story into a series of convoluted crises.
Could be. We'll never know exactly what DPC had planned originally. My overall impression, though, is that the game we have now is pretty compatible with the game we saw in Episode 1. The only thing that feels like it was adapted after the fact is the '4 episode season' aspect. Episode 5 felt like it SHOULD have been the end of the first act but had to be booted to season 2 for logistical reasons. Likewise, it wouldn't surprise me if DPC leaned more heavily into things like the Tybalt blackmail plot to stretch the crossroad out from Episode 7 to Episode 8 simply to match the season end.
Other than that, though, my guess is that DPC always intended to tell the 'traditional' romcom story and then bring Zoey back as a way to test the MC's choice. The 'new' roadblocks were part of the story from day 1.
To the extent that the narrative feels repetitive, I think that's because DPC doesn't quite appreciate that Zoey's backstory
on its own doesn't make her sufficiently different from the other LIs. Ideally, the rise and fall of the MC/Zoey relationship would have been the first act in its own right. Only after that would the MC move on to college, meet the new LIs and eventually settle on one. Then, when Zoey returns unexpectedly, we can share the MC's confused feelings; if we hadn't been forced to abandon Zoey, would we really have picked the new LI at all? What do we do now that we have?
Presumably, that's what DPC is going to try to do with the Interlude: make us retroactively buy into what the MC and Zoey had and thus question the decision we just made. Unfortunately, the timing is all wrong. By making such a big deal out the choice of new LI, we're instantly going to be far more defensive of that choice than the MC is. Right away our perception of Zoey differs sharply from how the MC's.
On top of that, by making the "original" romance retroactive, we're going to be instinctively reluctant to commit to it fully - unless we didn't have much investment in the new LIs to begin with. Worse, if we
have invested in the new LI, we want to see the MC spend time with his LI!! That last thing we want is to watch the MC hook up with a mortal threat to that LI! Yet we will be forced to endure the latter before we can get back to the former. The idea that we would ever side with the force-fed Zoey romance over the new LI after that is... let's call it overly optimistic.
In the end, Zoey's "threat" to, say, M&J, is no different than Bella's: we're told the MC has powerful chemistry with her, but we may or may not feel it ourselves. If Bella didn't edge out M&J in our eyes, Zoey won't either. (Meanwhile, if we did choose Bella's case, we know the player already bought into the chemistry with her. So Zoey is at best a pale copy with ~7 episodes less development to catch our interest.) Artificially elevating Zoey to be a threat to each and every other LI yields the same problem that's bedeviled many a franchise sequel over the years: it's just doing the same thing all over again with more flash and far less substance.
Thus the repetition. That's my take, anyway.
