About playtime, I can't give you a better estimation as I didn't check how much time I actually spent. Plus I tend to read text very carefully, as I make manual translations of games and I'm basically proofreading them, so my pace may be slower than most people's. But what I tried to mean is that this is a long game and it's likely you would need to play it during a couple of days, at least. Not just one lazy afternoon and done (in "The Warrior's Heart", for instance, it takes about 3-4 hours to complete all the paths, even without skipping already seen text).
About choices, in addition to focusing on one of the 3 main love interests, you can shape your character to be good or evil, and all those minor choices add up to determine which path will you follow and how do you approach the final mission; then, in that mission, you'll have more or less options available depending on your past choices but also on the choices you make during this particular last stretch (so you can fail miserably). There are 8 different endings and even in each one of those endings there are still some variations that take into account your past actions, so you might not get the 'perfect' ending you were aiming for, even if you get your desired path's ending. For instance, do you try to help a random girl in chapter 3, or do you choose to take advantage of her situation? Maybe that girl will show up again later on and act accordingly to what you did, or maybe you just scared her away and you'll get a totally different scene with different people and different options instead - or maybe you don't even meet her at all because you choose to go somewhere else in chapter 3.
