I generally like this game even though I do not like the AI art at all, but I really do not understand the overwhelming praise for it.
The game falls into the old system of stat grinding with no real justification for it. You see this a lot in complaints about older games where you click on certain buttons to grind stats (see the stuff from LOP or the old Simgirls stuff if you want to know what I mean), and it's probably why we've mostly moved on to VNs (even though there are numerous problems with the way they're written and game design issues that are inherent in VNs made with Renpy too).
I don't understand the purpose of grinding for stats nor NG+. There are no failure conditions, and you get "improved" text if you pass a stat check, so the best way to play this game would be to max out all your stats at the start. There is no purpose to NG+ because of this - the only thing that you cannot see by grinding for stats on a fresh playthrough is a different part of the intro.
I could understand some amount of grind if there were different branches to a story depending on whether or not you pass a stat check (but you get back to the original problem of going for maximum stats for the "best" result), but in the game's current state you can't even see the "weaker" text in NG+.
All the grinding involved really hits a point that makes the game really hard to play. There's a certain amount of cognitive overload involved when you have to juggle the schedule of multiple different characters. Since each character is mostly a self-contained story, the easiest way to play would be to focus on one girl at a time until you complete their content.
You run into issues when you do this though with certain characters. With Sophia, it's possible to decipher text on Thursday/Friday and not have her see it until Sunday. This means you can't progress the story until the following Saturday. If you do not instantly go to the library after the event on Saturday (because of the cognitive overload if you're focusing on multiple characters), it's possible for you to not alter/decipher the content fast enough for you to meet Sophia again the Saturday after.
You see it with Maya and Lena too. Why do I have to wait so many days between photoshoots? Why does Julia tell me to do things "tomorrow" if by design we have to wait two days between events? There are narrative inconsistencies that arise because of these mechanical design choices.
If you do choose to focus on multiple characters at a time, you run into another issue (not including missing events because of the cognitive overload) - you'll realize that there are a lot of meaningless stat checks, and that the best way to get through the game is to get to 8/9 in each stat, and if you do that, you might as well as get to 11 in each stat too. There's almost no reason for NG+ to exist if you can also view scenes again with the lucid dream sip.
I recall reading that characters such as Madison were the first to be made. I don't really like some of the mechanical issues that result from having a character's content being mainly locked behind one page. It results in you having a story, then a page with you mainly asking "do you want too see this content?". After seeing the content, I would then choose to load a previous save, because in the case of characters like Maya, viewing the content does not unlock anything and I'm wasting my time/money, even it doesn't really matter much in this game (on a sidenote, having two places to grind up your physique is confusing). It feels like they're side-stories to already self-contained stories.
I can't really think of any good solutions to the problems above. Without any connections between the characters, grinding through each character one at a time feels like a chore, but going through them together feels like one too, even if the content in the game is generally good.
Bugs: I don't believe Madison's stacks-a1 and wedding-dress-bj scenes are unlockable. She is also still dealing with wedding invitations after her wedding.
I live, breathe, and die for a cute virgin that cheats on me. But I have some doubts that's here, and a lot of the writing feels AI. It makes my eyes glaze over after a bit.
The writing doesn't feel like AI for the most part. It feels like almost all of it was written by hand, with the occasional rewording from the results of AI prompts. There's also parts where you think the developer has read too much AI text, so now everything is either a facade or a power dynamic (those two terms are not actually used that often in the story). I don't really have problems with those terms, but the way they're often used makes everything predictable.
If anything, the writing is the least bothersome part about the entire game. It doesn't waste your time with meaningless content leading to nowhere. You aren't given walls of text to read (though some of it could be a bit shorter), and most of it serves a narrative purpose or is otherwise interesting. You don't have to make any real choices in this game other than deciding on the type of content you want to see. There are very few games with this style of a concise story.
I guess I've mostly answered my initial question by responding to you, but I think most of the actual game's design is horrible. Why is everyone praising this game? It's a slog to play through.
