I don't come to futa/trans threads and complain about women with penises. You played a game where you rescue slaves - what did you expect? The slaves to tell you it wasn't that bad? To completely gloss over the fact they were slaves in the first place?
I think you are glossing over the entire premise of you being put in the hands of a new manager running a hotel where you know... you form a harem with the residents staying there. The preachy aspect of the story was when Runey starting drinking the "modern audience" lemonade. Not a bad thing, still a good game but a very different one to degree most really feel the game dipped for them at the mid point.
Start the game and maybe you really like the yandere who was not gonna take no for an answer, she was having your babies and you half told yourself "red flags be damned, i am going along for the ride" and we went from that yandere suck you off in front of her disgusted mom main character to an entire arc on her being deeply depressed and pining for a surrogate mother. That is a tonal shift and then some.
Or the anti-Lin aka her big sister Jin who is proud of her wanton sexual appetite, gives zero fucks what anyone thinks of her degenerate behaviour and mannerisms and was the active plot device to "train" using the dungeon where it is literally a sex room for BDSM fun times... now being turned into Lin 2.0 and significantly less interesting for it. They even had her protesting against going "clean" in her story only for it to be forced on her with with no say so as a player and now she... well she looks after the garden in her spare time. That is a tonal shift and then some.
Or the cock sure sex pest cam girl who wants to fuck everyone, wants you to fuck everyone and will facilitate that for your needs, her needs and for the sheer viewing pleasure of it. All that confidence stripped away from her and is now a moping barmaid has no agency no more because of course she is now elf number 1244 in the story. That is tonal shift and then some.
I am not sure if this was the direction the story was always heading (not convinced it was in totality given age of the game and drastically different approach to content we had then vs now... back then there was a lot of focus on degrading your girls at the local cafe and making them submissive in the dungeon - you ain't getting none of that now). The fact he has rewritten DOZENS of scenes also shows he changed directions somewhere along the lines and that is his right to do so but Harem Hotel now is very different game from what it was then and that i think is fine. We all have to acknowledge this and it will always grate on some people and that is fine too. I do prefer the older style of HH though - back then it was add in a scene where you can creampie a drunk MILF in the bar despite her asking you not to... now you know his focus will be more on reminding us that religion is bad, corporations is bad, slavery is bad and so on.
It was always presented as such do not get me wrong even back in the day but not nowhere near this extent and would largely facilitate more sex scenes not depressing story beats... your meeting with Cornwall in a busy street would result in a fuck off competition for all to see. Those days are gone and very likely have long since been removed from the game by now (will have to start afresh one day and see how much has changed in all these rewrites). Slavers were always presented as assholes but they would be shown as such in scenes taking place smack dap in the middle of an honest to god orgy (i wonder how much of that scene was rewritten as well).
He has aged as a developer and the story he wants to tell has aged and matured with him but of course some of us old guard will miss the days when HH was more escapism than message and more mindless fucking than exposition. I have not tried the new update yet but it at least seems a positive direction based on changelog with a lot of focus on the side girls and a focus on sex scenes. With the better balance between heavy story beats and more fucking around the hotel i think there should be less arguing around here. We all like the game or we would not care so much so maybe after public release we can all stop squabbling for at least a week lol
