Sweet, just in time for the weekend. This rules, Runey -- thanks! Can't wait to get into it.
As for the genre wars, whatever. Pornography is literally famous for being impossible for actual judges to define with clear boundaries, so I don't know what the urgency is in trying to find a box to stuff an interactive fantasy experience into. And I don't know what anyone wins if their preferred term gets used. From everyone's tone it sounds like they're trying to roll up on the porn fanboard they literally registered themselves on to suggest that you should be less proud of something because it has a lot of sex in it.
This is all silly enough now but it's going to be even sillier in 50 years when people are less weird about the fact that a lot of character development and relationship growth happens during sex in real life, and marvel at the fact that our fiction just pretended that wasn't true for some reason. As if 80% of your most vivid memories and deepest regrets aren't about sex.
Yes, there's a lot of varied, creative, character-driven sex in this game, it's awesome. There's also extended worldbuilding and second-person bildungsroman scenes that are going to be completely non-titillating for like half an hour at a time. You could turn it on over a lunch break and just deal with AI ethics and postcolonial reparations until you have to shut it off again. Many of the scenes with adult content are important to character; and some are just fun fantasy-satisfying doinking that happen to be better written and more erotic because the characters are fleshed-out people with whom you've built up sexual tension over numerous real-time days.
And in turn the extended story periods are more exciting because not only are you engaging with characters you know intimately, but who knows, that riddle kid might give you a footjob and you could fuck that elf queen completely at random, crazier things have happened. The sides of the game are mutually reinforcing, that's what makes it an S-tier game. The scenes are just more interesting. It's hotter to have sex scenes with people you know, and more exciting to have narrative scenes with people you're pursuing. Getting through a narrative while trying to fall in love or just nail someone is a key mood in the human experience and it's not easy to replicate that energy unless there's a real prospect of it actually happening, viscerally, in the near future.
So I just don't get the obsession with putting this game in a box under a "porn" genre label. It's not like ice cream where if it's less than 10% milkfat you have to call it "frozen dessert" instead and we're all here with rulers and protractors trying to figure out if we saw Maria's ass 13.2% too often to avoid the "porn" label. This is just a story doing its thing smashing high fantasy, sci fi and erotic fiction together and people love it. And there's more of it right now, so like, eyes on the prize, people.
