It's called Friends in Need, not Friends Who Are Doing Perfectly Fine.
While a cute one-liner, that doesn't really mean anything. There are innumerable ways to write someone into a bad situation without compromising their likeability. People can easily find themselves "in need" without having gotten themselves into it by repeatedly being a moron or otherwise being unlikable/irritating/annoying/etc. Just go read the news. Good people get fucked over by bad luck every day. Rent prices skyrocket. People get hit by unexpected medical expenses. Houses burn down. Tons of people in this country are one unfortunate confluence of events from being in a really bad place through no fault of their own.
What is being demonstrated here is a common trap a lot of developers fall into when attempting to design a game which simultaneously wants to allow people to be unrepentant assholes to others and also have a good guy route. If the routes are coupled too closely to each other, one side or the other almost always suffers.
The developer reasonably wants enough people to experience both sides of the story or they might feel like it was a waste of time to put all that work into the evil path if everyone plays the good guy route and then moves on, but statistics of what players choose in games with a good/bad dichotomy tend to lean extremely heavily toward the good side. So, developers have to either make the good side less appealing or the bad side more appealing (usually both) to push people toward a more even distribution.
How does that work in a porn game? You intentionally make the love interests do things that you know the players won't like for whatever reason. If you can make the player angry at the love interest or make the player perceive them as having been tainted in some way, they'll be more likely to pick the degrading options. This increases uptake on the bad guy route at the expense of making a lot of people enjoy the good guy route less than they would have if there were on a route written explicitly for that purpose. Instead of both sides getting stories that quickly diverge onto separate paths tailored to each audience, at least one side (if not both) will get a suboptimal experience because they have to stick to one shared middle path with
relatively minor deviations.
Additionally, since I'm not allowed to have the option to not interact with a character because everything has to follow the shared path or I'll miss out on #content, I am finding myself forced to sit through long dialogue sections with characters who actively irritate me in order to get to the ones I still enjoy interacting with. The excuse that I don't have to fuck them is silly. It's like telling someone they don't have to swallow the food they don't like but they do have to keep swishing it around in their mouth for a few minutes before they're allowed to spit it out.
Also, as for the "friends" part of the title, only one of them was actually a friend before the story begins... and the behavior Nicki has demonstrated thus far is not the behavior of a friend. It's more like the behavior of someone who sees you as an emergency parachute that she doesn't want to touch until things get really bad. So, there's a single
ex-friend. The only other one with any relation to the MC is family and they're not presented as being friendly with each other either. Everyone else we meet is a stranger who just wants money and/or fame from him.
