Been reading over the last few pages of comments and I'd say that people are right to be annoyed with ICSTOR, I'm annoyed with ICSTOR. This game/VN, whatever you want to call it, does look great. ICSTOR is great at crafting gorgeous characters, renders and animations, but it's plain to see where their primary problem is: the story. Or, should I say, its lack of story.
The game lacks any connective tissue that links the events and characters with any kind of cohesion. The jumping off point for most of the characters is the embarassing incident of him being rejected by Celia, but then it just becomes a typical "fuck-em" quest game where the MC is now trying and succeeding to get into the pants of every woman in his life with relative ease in separate, disconnected stories with each of them. There seems to be no overarching narrative in the game at all which would obviously make it very difficult to discern what exactly you're doing and where you're going with this.
ICSTOR talks about "burn out", and whether that's true or just an excuse, I can see how someone would get burned out if they have no passion for what they're doing, and this can happen if you don't have an end goal in sight. If you don't know where your story is going and how it's going to end, then how can you possibly be excited and motivated to keep making a game that has no direction?
I'm sure ICSTOR has heard this all before, but craft the story first; know what you want it to look like at the beginning, middle and end, and then fill in the bits in between. Don't build the story towards the sex scenes, just build the story and then weave the sex scenes into the story where appropriate. Just look at what DPC does with BaDIK; the story has a nice, cohesive flow and the sex scenes work organically within it. We don't have a male MC doing various tasks over and over to gain a girl's favour with the end of goal of having sex with her, we have a character who is just living their life doing regular things and then opportunities for sex and various sexual interactions happen at specific points.
This is a winning formula and if ICSTOR can do this with their quality of renders and animations, they could produce really great games. But if they continue to suffer from "burn out", and have lost their passion for this work, then retire because we want devs who actually want to do this kind of work, not ones who think they have to do it.
