Really noticing the game seems weighted to a female protagonist, as I've seen events I never saw as male. I mean, those involving cleavage makes sense, but...
What, you mean you don't enjoy the attempts of women trying to write men?
It maybe isn't entirely fair to compare this to Degrees of Lewdity (or DoL to this), but its the closest I get. CoT here is far more quantity over quality it feels like thus far.
I think the biggest difference is that I can remove the "sex combat" from DoL, and it's still a good game. If I remove it from CoT, it's still a bad game, but will arguably improve.
I remember being ok with version 0.2, thinking that it would improve. It was very vanilla then, but that isn't what is wrong with the game. What's wrong with the game is the amount of poorly written scenes that do nothing but waste your time. Do I really need to read about your character being annoyed at people blocking the sidewalk, or having a bumpy ride because you hit a rock while on your bike? What about trying to trip someone? How old am I, five?
None of the above would be things I would consider "interesting". Many of them could be things that you've dealt with, although I've never felt the urge to trip someone (seriously, wtf?). Yet these scenes abound, and they count them when they do a numerical count of new scenes. They're simply misleading because none of that content is fresh. The developers can't come up with anything new, so they go with their tried and true classic "oh look, how annoying!".
From reading the positive reviews and comments, I get the impression that this game is written with a very specific type of person in mind. It appears to be written for someone who is really into the "role-playing" in role-playing games, so they're blind to everything else. They're probably also part of a group that typically doesn't have adult games targeted at them.
The end result is that everything written is low effort, because it doesn't need to be high effort. They have no competitors, so they inevitably end up churning out lazy*, poorly written content that is as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle. You simply do not need to put in the effort to write meaningful content when you have no competition.
The overworld content mainly consists of you walking around, with the developers telling you "look, how lewd!", as though they're one of your great-great-grandmothers. Look at the bus scene for example:
Code:
As you're riding along, you can hear music coming tinnily from some person's headphones. The beat gets to you and you start to sway to rhythm as much as space allows.
You pick up some of the words here and there and gradually, you realize... those lyrics are filthy!
The artist describes in explicit details what they physically like in a partner. And the chorus is even worse, describing what the partner would do for the artist! You can't help imagining the scene. And it's turning you on!
(You spend the rest of the trip trying to hide your arousal and avoiding eye contact.) OR (You didn't expect to get horny from a song, but here you are. Oh well.)
Ok, Maude, how was your tea party with Prudence? Do I really need to explain in detail why the writing is bad?
Almost every interaction written is some form of "X does A to Y" or "Y does B to X". You see it everywhere - at the bar, at parties, in the cafeteria, and during sex. Everything is written with this in mind. The developers cannot imagine something otherwise. If you buy someone a drink, they must react to you to continue the conversation. If they thank you, they must go with a more formal "thank you" instead of "thanks". Why? It's ingrained in their socialization. No matter what though, the conversation must go on - everyone serves as a plaything. There is no failure state. In DoL, three drinks will get you laid, but a fourth will have them pass out. In CoT, you chat until you either bang or go on a date, where you then bang. Every character serves as an interactive pet, even your actual in-game pets (which are the one thing that cannot interact with you... it's a horribly missed opportunity).
Now, as to why they're lazy - they aren't lazy in the typical sense. It's certainly a lot of work churning out content, but none of that content has any consequence. They aren't lazy because they don't put in the work. They're lazy because they take the path of least resistance.
A major problem in this game is that none of the content connects to anything deeper. They like to reuse frameworks (Something happening to your clothes is a framework. Parties are a framework. The same goes with classes, sex, etc.).
I don't think I need to write about clothes and how the developers use that as a crutch when they can't come up with new content.
Consider something like parties - every party functions the same way. A party starts at 6:00 pm and ends at 4:00 am (except for one, I think). There are snacks and drinks. You chat with people. It takes 25 minutes. You ask if they want to bang. You bang, and then go back to the party.
This sounds like many parties in real life, but the point I want to make is this - they want to recycle old content and call it new content by adding something new to it. The Halloween party is such an example. You go in and see one new scene with sexual content, and some scenes involving contests. Everything else stays the same. You see a similar thing in the New Year's Eve party, as well as the Greek parties. It should really make you ask one question - why would you care about these parties if they only offer one or two new things unrelated to the party? You can go further and ask if there is even a point to the parties.
If you pay attention to it, you'll see it everywhere. You even see it after the sex. They hype up aftercare in the development logs, but what do you really get? A few lines of meaningless text, with an option of having sex again. They've reused this framework so they can pretend that they've added content for all the mindless drones getting off over incredibly mechanical descriptions of sex. They can't even get this part right, since you're fully clothed for round 2! How long did it take them to notice that you could cum in someone, even if they didn't want you to, as long as they were in the cowgirl position? Now we have condoms, and we have similar buggy issues - they may or may not want you to wear a condom immediately after saying they do/don't want you to wear one, or they'll ask you to wear one after you're already fucked them. An alternative also exists - you can fuck them in the ass, and the game might mention that it was their least favourite part of sex. They want to be "realistic", but then you'll find out that every girl is fine with you taking turns between their vagina and ass.
The developers churn out all these new scenes because they can't be bothered to actually work on anything else. They barely touch the old content, with only the school mascot being added to clubs. Even there they recycle old content. They removed the ability to interact with other characters, and on game days, you get to waste hours of in-game time seeing a tiny amount of new content.
They don't actually want to work on the content in their roadmap, so everything has an abrupt ending. What happened to new content for QuickieBurger? You have a strike, you get paid more, and it ends there. What about the arcade? It's three days of content masquerading as three weeks. You create a save slot, look at the results for each choice, then never touch the arcade again. The same goes for clubs.
How do these things interact with the rest of the game? They don't. The closest thing would be hangouts/dates, but even then you're only at that location - you aren't interacting with that location, and you don't have characters there recognizing you. You simply get a few blocks of text with non-consequential choices to go over.
The writing is mechanical and your choices are inconsequential. The roadmap serves as a guide so they can tick something off a checklist, even if they don't want to write something for it. This is why the NC and GS content were removed. They couldn't write anything for them, and the content that did exist was very mechanical. I don't think people who are into that type of content would want them to be written that way. It took them a while to realize that not everyone can be satisfied like the degenerates who are into incest and who are happy to bang someone as long as they're called their landlady/landlord/roommate.
I don't think I need to write about the issues with the developers thinking they could replace men and women with each other and having the same effect. That would probably deserve its own separate, but shorter post, and I'm not really interested in writing about that.
tl:dr: The game isn't bad because it's vanilla. It's bad because it's mechanical and the developers are uninspired prudes. You would only be able to enjoy it if you're really into the "role-playing" part of role-playing games or have never played any other game with interactive sex scenes.
