You keep calling it side content and ignoring that there is plenty of mandatory porn in the game. And many of the porn scenes are pretty strongly tied to the larger narrative.
Again your mental gymnastics are very impressive, kudos.
"Look at the Yumi accusations of sexual crimes committed on her by Sensei since basically the beginning of the game, that is a good example of how it can be done without showing the action."
And yet somehow that doesn't apply to the puzzles. Lmao.
Pray tell, what do you think the dark route will entail? The one thing sensei has not yet done but the gods are trying to force him to is rape. That's going to involve plenty of mandatory sexual content.
I keep calling it that because that's the official word on it. The side content being mandatory is just not the case despite being unavoidable. To make it NOT be side content, it has to be vital to the story, but it is not. The narrative can go without them and remain the same because the narrative is about the events taking place, the sex just happens to be featured in those events unnecessarily.
There are no mental gymnastics, it can't be applied to the puzzles because there is a development reason for the puzzles that is actually good enough to keep them, the attempt to get people to pay attention and to punish those who do not with getting stuck.
Oh no, Denpa games typically get MUCH darker than anything we've seen or been given hints to so far. The dark route is where we could very easily be seeing things as dark as character deaths, especially ones committed through the will of the driving factor of the events getting darker, which is the gods, but also including the potential for characters to go full psycho, especially Ami. Doki Doki Literature Club, while lighter than most Denpa games, is a good example of how the dark route could go.
Let's ignore the mandatory sex scenes for a second:
Even if you basically go past them and write "and so we fucked" specifically showing Sensei having sex with his students...
It won't be the same.
Afair, tHere's a fuck ton of monologues that Sensei has during these sex scenes that show his character in ways that can't be shown in others, like in the "happy event" in the clock room.
That shit wouldn't be nearly as impactful without the scene of sensei "nailing" "Maya".
It would need to be altered a bit visually, but the impact would be there. The sex isn't as integrated as you think.
It's not side content. Porn is an element of the game's design as much as the puzzles, hence the lust meter and why some events, which have lore implications, are entirely missable if you haven't got the lust meter high enough.
Again, so does the porn. The porn is another layer to add investment to the characters and strengthen the tie-in between player and Sensei.
I don't disagree on puzzles being vital, I think they could be done different but I agree on the resistance being an important part of the experience. I just don't see how all your arguments for the puzzles don't also apply to the porn.
Sel said it is, so it is side content, a developer's word on their own work is essentially law on the project. It can be removed with little impact, the puzzles cannot because they serve a purpose outside the story, punishing those who do not pay attention in the hope that people will learn to do so through getting stuck. Notice how that lust meter is completely optional, you can go the entire game without even once incrementing it and the missable aspect is part of them being side content, they wouldn't be missable if they weren't side content, they were designed so that they can be skipped for anyone who has no interest in them and is in it for the story. Also, of course the scenes have lore implications, he's not going to throw sex scenes into the game if they aren't tied into the story, that's not how an adult VN with side content porn works, that's how a porn game works.
This strengthening of tie-ins can be done without the porn, making the porn an unnecessary extra only used as side content.
They don't apply because the puzzles have a development reason that is still just as important today as it was the first time they came in, keeping the player paying attention. Think of it like a teacher coming over to a student sleeping in class and whacking them with a book, not common in the real world these days, but not an uncommon scene in fiction. The sleeping student is the player, the sleeping is not paying attention to the text, and the whack is getting stuck.
Wait a second, I remember the lust meter being necessary to unlockcertain events...
But were those events also necessary to continue the main story?
I fucking forgot, but I'm pretty sure they fucking were necessary.
"Secondary content" argument blown the fuck up.
The parts that the meter is needed for are skipped over if the meter is not incremented (or in the case of lust events tied to main events incremented before the main event happens). This is why you can go through a main event that has a lust event tied to it and not even know there was a lust event tied to it until you notice the event tracker shows a missed event. The Halloween events for example, you can totally miss the Sara/Haruka scenes. This happened quite a bit back when the first Halloween event came in.
