I'd broadly agree with this sentiment. It didn't feel great going through the game the recommended way - doing all of the minigames and optional combat - only to find out relatively late on that it branches (as opposed to being fairly linear with optional side content) and the game's intention was for you to play through multiple times, including the minigames, if you wanted to unlock all of the scenes. I'm no stranger to branching VNs and I'm perfectly fine with them but I feel like they devalue the time a player spends on non-VN gameplay aspects (e.g. stats, money, combat) if that gameplay doesn't hold up as an engaging experience by itself.
At the moment I feel like the rest of the game is good enough to stick with it, but it pretty much killed off any reason not to skip all of the minigames and cheat money if ever needed.
