Looking at the devs description of Depths Revival on their SS made me laugh after reading all these posts about the ending.
Description in question:
"Alright, now let's talk about the game Depth's Revival:
Depth's Revival is an adult visual novel that changes with the choices you make through the game. You play as a college student that awakens his subconscious to change his life. With his subconscious help, he can become the man he always wanted to become.
The game itself focuses on romance and character stories. There's no particular main story. It's just you and your subconscious fixing your life while meeting with various girls and experiencing their life stories. And in the end, you can create your harem with all the girls you've met, or you can focus on a single girl and experience further of her story. There are no bad endings on this game, just happiness to escape from all that bullshit the world throws at us."
Anyways, despite the small laugh I got from seeing that, in the end I'm left more so in disappointment in the devs self immolation of any good faith he had with his player base by writing such a terrible ending.
I know a ton of writers would rather take a bullet to the head instead of going back to retcon something they've written when faced with community backlash, but when it comes to something that's been worked on for this long, is it really so bad to put in a bit of extra work to add an option to have a satisfying harem ending? And before the dev argues semantics, this is very much so a bad ending.
I'd much rather have the reputation of someone who's willing to listen to the "fanbase" than have the reputation of someone who has their ego shoved so far up their ass that they would see going back and changing something as "pandering to the cretins" who "oh so unbelievably" wanted to remember a game fondly in the end rather than something you remember in distasteful infamy.
Having something you created criticized so harshly by so many people can be debilitating on someone's creative motivation, but sometimes you just have to sit back and think "yup, I fucked up". There wouldn't be so much backlash if the thing you created wasn't so liked by so many players, so I truly do hope the dev could some day dedicate a bit of time to make an update that changes things before the solo endings. Even if the dev might be feeling bitter at those criticizing the game.
