NOTE: Reviewing as of version 0.37.
Very good game. I never played the original, but this game has a lot of good with very few cons, although they do stand out.
I'll start with the good. Lots of characters, lots of scenes, and each character has a personality that is distinct from one another. The scenes are well animated (some are very good, some are meh) and they are plentiful throughout the game. Almost every character has multiple scenes, and they are all fairly unique.
The story is pretty good, and as previously mentioned, each character actually has a personality. This plays well into the overall game as each character usually has different scenes based on what they do/where they are during the day, which I found to be immersive. Not a huge fan of shonen MC but eh whatever, as long as it's not shoving it down my throat.
The game would be 5 stars except for a few things that combine into something I think is too prevalent today: grindiness. I will give it to this game, it is less grindy than most games nowadays. However, it still pushes my limit a bit too much for my liking.
The first major con was only added recently, and that is the removal of the bed button. Honestly, if that had stayed in, I would've probably rated this 5 stars. For those that are unaware, the game has an "energy bar" with 3 partitions, and each time you perform an action (talking to another character) it removes one partition. Then, to refill energy, you must sleep or (now) drink coffee. Before, there was a bed button that would return you to your room, making it easy to sleep and recharge, but that was removed in a recent update. This is just an annoying change that should be reversed. Personally, I think the energy system itself is kind of dumb in a porn game, and increasing the number of clicks to recharge energy from 1 to 3-5 is very annoying.
The other con I have is having to repeat scenes to move forward with a character. For some characters at some points in the story, there are a few scenes you can do to increase their relationship. However, at others, there is only one or two that you have to repeat a few times to advance. It's not many, but it is something that I don't really enjoy doing in these games and find tedious.
Overall, this game is amazing with a few cons that make me more frustrated than I should be. I think removing QOL shortcuts and having repeated scenes just adds more time to the game that is unnecessary, and moves a perfectly good game like this down to 4 stars for me. There's no reason I should be looking to extend my time between scenes in a game like this due to some lousy extra mechanics you're trying to implement. However, this does not take away from the great writing and scenes prevalent throughout the game.