My broader point (not meeting the art at its level, using fallacious reasoning to justify one's dislike) applies to all of it. I bring up the individual points only in reference. No strawmanning needed.
Wasting time - indeed, the game is trying to waste your time. It therefore makes no sense to critique it for wasting your time. This is like critiquing a silent film for not having spoken dialogue. Of course, you can say "I do not like having my time wasted," that's fair, but this does not translate to an active or meaningful critique of the work. Indeed, you can say my broader point is that failing to distinguish personal dislike with meaningful critique is the problem here. It is not the case that just because someone dislikes something that whatever reasoning they come up for justifying that dislike is meaningful. Meaningful critique requires meeting the work at its level and suggesting improvements within its intended vector, which is by and large not happening here. (That said, to be clear, this is not something unique to F95 users; people in general have, as is such a meme, low media literacy, and in general respond to unhappy feelings by trying to attack the source of said feelings. Measured critique is rare.)
Sandbox gameplay - it is, to my understanding, completely purposeful that as the game goes on progression gets increasingly obtuse and annoying. The purpose is not to be intuitive and provide a clear method of progression at all times. Any meaningful critique of the Sandbox gameplay will have to first begin on this level. What are better ways the game could be obtuse and time-wasting while still being obtuse and time-wasting? That's a pretty complex subject, isn't it? It would be interesting to see what people could come up with. Instead, we get very meaningless statements like "it is not intuitive." Does one imagine Selebus necessitates an arbitrary phone call to an arbitrary person at an arbitrary time slot and thinks "Yep, this is intuitive, all according to plan?" No. Do people think that Selebus has no awareness it's annoying to grind Wakana or Chinami affection or whatever with limited weekend slots? Hopefully not. Therefore, how the fuck is one supposed to respond to observations like "Sir, this is not intuitive!" I'm sorry to say there is no response except to grimace a bit. You've not met the game with that level of critique. You have to think: "Okay, this is not intuitive, how to we present this in a way players will agree with instead of get upset about?" And once you have an answer, present your critique like that. As an example: "I would feel better about the arbitrary way in which we have to guess when to call people if the story better emphasized that Sensei himself was randomly calling and that it was frustrating for him too when nobody answered, because then it would feel like the developer is self-aware at least." (This, of course, is up for debate itself, but at least it's working within the intended context of the game.) In short, It would be beneficial to think a bit more about these matters. If you want to critique the sandbox, it needs to be more internal to the game. And to be clear, I think the sandbox is not very creative or well-made in particular. But the question of how to maintain this obtuse, intentionally abrasive / unintuitive progression while improving it is actually a very difficult one. So I don't go about posting lazy "critiques" which in reality mean and say nothing. I'm still thinking about how it could be done better within this context.
You can think of this in relation to deaf players complaining about the audio cues BTW. It is literally impossible for them to progress on their own. That can't be a pleasant feeling. But it clearly makes no sense to critique the game for using audio to convey important information. If the game didn't do that it wouldn't be Lessons in Love anymore. That is a "critique from the angle of accessibility" (external) vs "a critique for the ideal form of a game as intended" (internal). And I think in general we should want creators resilient to a storm of meaningless external critique since that's how you end up with generic slurry. It's to some degree ironic that LiL has attracted so many with its boldness, yet as soon as that boldness is unpleasant in any way the player turns their back and starts complaining. I think that an interesting thing to think about here may be the bugs. I know someone deathly afraid of bugs who quit LiL immediately because it has a lot of bugs. However, it's unlikely f95 bros are in particular upset about bugs. That's 50% because the average person is not so afraid of bugs and 50% because it's clearly part of the artistic purpose to have so many bugs. This is to say, people UNDERSTAND the bugs as internal to the work and would no more say to remove them as they would say to make every heroine an adult. It's only when things get more nuanced and abstract like game design that people start failing to understand, then add on personal displeasure and it's a recipe for disaster. It's just a bit too hard to understand something being unpleasant and unintuitive and so on can be on purpose. The user I responded to suggested awareness of this, but then immediately indicated that it would be acceptable only if, for example, it had skill expression. We can see the absurdity here. Imagine the bug-hater suggesting that bugs are only okay in specific contexts like the bugs are mostly out of frame, or if there's an option in the menu to turn bugs off... Who respects the artistic integrity of World of Warcraft including an option to make all the spiders lobsters in their spider expansion?
Affection/Lust: "used to be ok but is now very grindy": Yeah, this is yet another case that is the above 1:1. That is indeed the purpose. It is no secret that Selebus does not look fondly on western eroge gamifying lust and designing their games around you like fucking heroines silly. There is heavy nuance in the lust scenes within LiL that you are seeing the consequences of sex addiction - the consequences of taking girls and fucking them way too much (like Ayane getting so coomer brained she banged Sensei in a dangerous position and got caught by Kirin). This is to say that there is an intention that grinding lust is NOT a good thing. It is NOT a pleasant activity. It does NOT have pleasant consequences. Therefore: if one is to want to critique lust, you have to engage at this level. This sucks - okay, yes, so what? Lessons in Love will NEVER make it fun to grind lust. The activity will never be fun and encouraging. It wants you to fucking stop, if I'm being honest. So you need to suggest ways in which to make grinding lust suck but in a way which feels superior to the current execution. Off the top of my head, something I may say is that each point of lust should have its own scene, and the scenes could be really unpleasant, like Sensei is really blunt and you feel the damage he is causing in that moment blah blah. Envision him telling the heroine to shut up or whatever so it's mostly a silent and unpleasant affair. This would maintain most unpleasant aspects of the system while not feeling like a low-effort grind. However, I'm not fully sure on that, since there may be a purpose specifically to the repetition that I'm missing. All of this is to say that there is indeed likely room for improvement here, but the improvement will never and should never come in the form of making it not feel like a horrible and unpleasant time. (And therefore the post was total hogwash with zero substance.)
