i dont understand why people love so much sandbox? sooooooooooooo annoying !!!
A good sandbox allows you to pick and choose which characters to pursue
(it is a lot easier to exclude characters in a sandbox) and to also focus on a specific character.
likewise for optional side quests and routes.
Sandbox also handles reworks of old content better in terms of ability to import saves (assuming dev is not completely clueless about proper programming)
It is also easier to playest individual routes in a larger game. as dev can start a new game and focus on a specific character while ignoring others.
I have seen VNs where there were too many waifus where I just couldn't remember who is who because the game went round robin. meaning after a scene with waifu 1, i had to go through a scene with waifus 2 through 50, in order, before I saw waifu 1 again.
Although that is an extreme example and most games do not have 50 waifus.
The easiest thing to do though is just make a kinetic novel. or a visual novel with so few choices it might as well be a kinetic novel.
Bad VNs I have seen come in 3 forms:
1. kinetic novels
2. actually a sandbox with a VN's graphical interface (often but not always happens when you can choose between VN and sandbox and the VN is literally just an overlay over the sandbox. like in the game "simple days")
3. despite how vastly simpler it is to make a VN, dev still manages to fuck up variable tracking severely. (ex: the fate of Irnia)
Whether sandbox or VN is better really depends on the game's production quality
Atrociously bad?
VN is better and there is less opportunities for the dev to fuckup. (ex: much harder for dev to implement pointless grinding in a VN)
mid quality game?
Sandbox is better in my opinion. as it gives more choices and controls.
Good game?
it does not matter. they will both be good.
I see a lot of times where people compare the highest quality VNs to the worst quality sandboxes, or the highest quality sandbox to the worst quality VNs. To backup their notion that one is better than the other.
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Now, that all being said... the sandbox in this game so far is not done well.
Many times you are either hunting for the one single thing you can click to progress, or you know what it is and just need to make some pointless clicks to trigger the next scene.
There are lots of empty rooms that exists solely to waste your time and make you click a bunch of times to move around. (maybe one day in the future they will have a use, but not right now)
The GUI for navigating is not very good (forcing you to walk step by step through those empty rooms. should be a house map that lets you instantly travel to a selected room, and the map should show you the location of other characters).