Alright. Thoughts: As I was afraid, the story and amount of dialog is what I would call bloated. Maybe a platformer wasn't the best way to tell this story because every room it's WORDS WORDS WORDS. I was not engaged in the slightest with the story and I'd say the writing falls short where it would matter most in this sort of game: the H scenes. They aren't erotic or tantalizing in the slightest, they try to be aloof and funny, and they just aren't, so it fails on two fronts. Irony? Considering they're written by a guy whose name would suggest he might be good at this, but HentaiWriter is seemingly the worst at writing actual HENTAI.
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I'm in agreement for the most part. I can't really comment on the overall quality of the writing if I'm skipping through much of it - I will give props for having reactive and interlinked side/sub-plots within the levels, but it feels like that much effort and intricacy would be best reserved for a project of its own - because so much of it is disconnected from most of the audience's motivation for playing the game - much of it isn't erotic in nature - and this especially shows in the H-scenes themselves.
With the team, talents and resources they have - the art is good, the gameplay and level design are at least competent, and while maybe not befitting a porn game, branching/reactive dialog sequences and side-quests and morality systems with consequences aren't trivial things to develop, and like it or not people are willing to fund its development - they could easily (""easily"") make an S-tier H-game.
They just need to refactor where the efforts and resources go. Give us a boilerplate "majik gurl save da worl!! Rapey monsters o noe!!1!" or basically any other premise, an intro cutscene or even just a blurb to establish the setting, the character, their goal and their obstacles. Pump the majority of the effort into creating the enemies, their animations and any other H-scenes, and if you want to spice things up, systems that tie in to that - arousal, corruption, status effects, clothing destruction etc.
The levels this takes place in don't need to be elaborate, puzzling or challenging to figure out. Shit, Guilty Hell and its sequel are amongst the most highly-anticipated and well-regarded H-games out there, and their levels are mostly flat left-right side-scrolling with a minimum of platforming and the occasional gimmick. What carries them is their atmosphere for one, but mainly the content they contain. Some of that is dialog, but with most of it being untranslated, it gets skipped through just the same.
When I talk S-Tier, Mission Mermaiden and its upcoming sequel Hachina Ghost Story (
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) are amongst the examples I'd give. Most of its enemies die in one hit its levels are basic with some platforming. IIRC only the main character and antagonists are voiced. It's not going to pick up many points in the gameplay or story department and it's not trying to - instead its focus is on the H-content, with ample enemy variety and status-effects that can each re-contextualize the scenes, in a more immediate sense.
Even Kooonsoft's games, while not terribly ambitious even on the scale of H-games - they don't fuck around, they just get straight to the fucking. Dead simple gameplay, practically no plot, and a relative wealth of smut content compared to its length and the investment it asks of the player.
This doesn't mean there's no room for story and characters and all that jazz - but I feel these things are best treated as a fine spice.
All this to say, I hope that once they're finally done with FF and are ready to start a new project, they go with something more straight-forwards - less voice-acting, less writing, more fucking and faster turn-around.