First off, this update really shone a light on the differences between the green and (various) red paths. Reading others experiences, it became clear that quite a lot of dialogue and even whole events were completely absent if you were diverting from the green path.
Examples:
- If you're on the good uncle path, Ami is apparently a lot less straightforward to Niki on Akira's behaviour. She does openly say that she wants to fuck her Dad, but she didn't (in this timeline) so from Niki's perspective it's still just threats from a rambling and hormonal, albeit weird, kid. There's no great revelation that Akira is fucking half the class or his niece/daughter. Which begs the question, how will that really impact the story going forward, given that in one instance Niki is apparently made aware and in the other still blissfully unaware? Unless I misread the other point of view presented by other user's posts.
- If you are not on the correct path with Tsukasa, you just straight up miss out on her second event apparently. And the same goes for Tsubasa's, unless there was a different trigger for that one.
- If you are not on Kirin's blackmail path, Kirin never apologizes to Ayane at the end of her event chain, in fact, she storms past her and explicitly tells her she is the second to last person she wants to see right now.
- If you are like me and you don't specifically enjoy the sex acts with Futaba since they feel like taking advantage of a severely insecure teen (not like it's not the case with others, but with Futaba I actually do feel bad), you will likely miss out on her second event, which in turn, will also lock you out of the Molly event, even if you fulfill her lust requirement. Which is an odd programming choice, but I assume that Molly's event must somehow pick up from Futaba's event, so that it could not work alone by itself without the previous one happening?
There might be more, other than obvious dialogue variations, feel free to let me know if you noticed anything else.
And yes, I know, I could just use URM to change the values and get the events anyway. But first of all, it's about the principal, I'm evaluating the natural user experience when playing the game blind and how much content can be missed by seemingly arbitrary player decisions. And while I don't say this is bad per se, I feel like it should still be highlighted that the game might feel incomplete if you don't follow something like the guide mod or alter values in URM.
Which brings me to my second point, altering the values to see certain events still won't necessarily give you context. Sure, you will see the situation unfolding as if the requirements were met, but you effectively did not experience the exact events that led to said outcome. This may not always be relevant, especially for lewd scenes I assume, but it's still a reason for me to disregard URM for now. Instead this just gives me more motivation to finish my replay quickly and get a green path up to date so that I can use it for a second run of new updates to complete all events.
