Bold white my old answers, normal white your answers to them, and bold teal my new answers.
Cheating? On whom? Please, explain. He hasn't cheated on any girl because when they have decided to start a relationship, he has been sincere and has told them there are more girls. Yeah he starts doing that after the first couple of girls he hooks up with but for the first couple of relationships I'm pretty sure he doesn't mention anything to begin with. Might have just been Erika and Nora? I think Nora is first hookup so obviously that's fine, but he pretty clearly doesn't mention anything to at least Erika after that or the scene where she's surprised to catch you with Nora doesn't make any sense. Norah greenlights him to be with other girls while she makes up her mind (café scene on Saturday). Erika, on Friday after the kiss, says that she doesn’t want to start a relationship yet because she should think a lot about it. No cheating on any of them, since they aren’t in a relationship at that time.
Well, it's a porn game. I think no one is here to read a faithful version of Snow White. Yeah fair enough it's expected in a porn game. I'd just prefer it without the half hearted attempts to make it sound like it makes sense. If it was just gung-ho in your face about it, it'd be easier to just go "oh ok it's a porn game so it's fine" but when it tries to make up a rational explantion for why everything is operating on porn logic it kind of falls apart. My response was to your comment about the harem being open only one way being porn logic. The MC tries to make a harem (not a polyamorous relationship) in the most just way inside the genre (porn harem without NTR or sharing). I think there aren’t a lot of ways to do it and the MC looked the best to me. From my point of view, a harem in real life is undesirable. In a game…
Right now only 12 want to share, and some of them not so willingly. I don't remember rendering or writing dialogue for the extra 8+ sharing girls you talk about. Obviously the game isn't finished yet but given it's a harem porn game I'm assuming at some point all the girls who are introduced agree to share the MC. I don’t think a harem game should convince the player that 28 girls want to share him. It’s the premise since it’s a harem game. It’s like saying that Star Wars tries to convince the viewers about light sabers or Jedi existing. Even convincing three girls would look implausible to me.
I'd be fine if the game leaned into and the MC admitted he was just being a horny bastard but I'm supposed to believe the MC is a saint for letting all these girls bang him at the same time. At one point the cousin even catches you cheating on her with mum (No cheating on Erika, since they aren't in a relationship yet) and she talks to your mum about it. We get the absolutely absurd explanation that banging other people immediately after talking about entering a relationship (But not entering a relationship, Erika tells the MC she has a lot of things to think about before doing it) is totally fine as long as you didn't explicitly say it wasn't allowed (Please, re-read that conversation. Martha says it's not cheating if Erika and her then mysterious man haven't explicitly entered a relationship because Erika had to sort her thoughts). And this is coming from the MC's mother who starts the game being furious about her husband cheating on her without saying anything?! (She was in a relationship. Erika wasn't) Yeah I get the point of the conversation and what it's trying to say. I'm just not convinced any real person would actually say it and if the dialogue isn't convincing why bother including it? Just as a token effort to justify the harem? I'm not saying this is an unreasonable position for a porn game to take, I'm saying this dialogue seems like it's trying to convince the player that this is a reasonable position an ordinary person might take. Maybe I'm out of the loop but my understanding is that outside of a porn game, if you ask someone out and they ask for a little time to think about, they're definitely not going to be happy about you eating out their mum or anyone else immediately afterwards. So either we're operating on porn logic and this is fine in which case this dialogue is pointless because porn logic is already assumed to be in effect in a porn game or we're operating on real world logic and this is just an unconvincing justification for the MC to be banging everyone. You talk about ordinary people and real life. How many (western) harems do you know about in real life? The genre per se needs some suspension of belief and some extraordinary people. Just like Star Wars.
If I ask someone out in Real Life and she says she needs to think about it, it won’t work, since she’s not as invested in me as I’m in her. In a game, as a player, I can wait for a couple of updates.
I don't know you, but when I'm not interested in someone, that person doesn't disappear from the world; I would have a big problem since I'm not interested in most people who produce the food I eat. You can choose if a girl enters your harem, not if she vaporizes or is abducted by aliens.
Imagine if you play a monogamous playthrough how much you should wait. It becomes a choice. Or imagine if your favorites were the ones left out of the game. I've stuck these two points together since they're connected.
You can still minimize interactions with people in reality. This also isn't reality it's a game, specifically a porn game. Even if we ignore people who just skip through all the dialogue for everything, if you're not interested in adding a girl to your harem you're going to be even less interested in listening to her tell you her life story.
I tried playing a monogamous play though for a bit mid way just to see what it was like. Unfortunately because of the choice to leave all the dialogue in for the girls you reject it becomes a horrible slog. At least if most of the one on one dialogue of the girls you reject was hidden it'd be a bit less painful. For instance if you reject Alexa why do you still go jogging with her later? If you reject Alexia on the first chance you have to start a relationship with her, you go jogging with her for the second chance most girls have.
That's why all of them are optional. You can say they're optional but you still have to sit through all their dialogue scenes which make up the vast majority of the game. Until the second chance shows up. From then on, their presence is somewhat reduced.
6 hours? A lot of CTRL pressing, right? I don't even know what CTRL pressing does? From context I'm guessing it skips the dialogue? If you're asking if I read all the dialogue, then yeah pretty much all of it, I got a bit lazy with it towards the end and started only skimming the dialogue of characters I wasn't interested in. The average reader reads around 200 words/minute without having to click every 14 words on average. Compensating the clicks with the paths you don’t have to read, that would mean 1,250 minutes with the current text (250.000 words). That’s 21h. That was the reason for my comment.
The next issue is that there are just too many girls in this game. The game starts off with just 6 (5) family members but the number quickly balloons out of control until theres something like 16 girls (There will be. 7 girls haven't arrived yet) just staying at your dorm/house + another couple of handfulls living elsewhere in the area. Yeah my bad I think I misremembered the family members because I included scarlett. There's what Nora, mum, Emma, scarlett, 2 cousins, ex girlfriend, singer, cop, friends mum and sister, clothes shop girl and the 4 dorm students introduced? So 16ish girls already with 7 more entering the house and maybe even some more side girls down the line? The total number was announced on release day, so no one could say I lied; if I retcon it now it could be problematic for my rep.
Anyway I wouldn't say this is a shitty game by any stretch and you clearly put a lot of work into it, but there's plenty of room for improvement which is why I gave it 3 stars. I wouldn't even say changing the things I didn't like about it would necessarily improve it since a lot of them are just things that annoyed me personally. I didn’t answer for you to change your rating, since you have good points in your review, and some I agree on (the ones I didn’t quote). I answered because there were some aspects of the review that didn’t look correct or looked like a misunderstanding.
If you're looking for actually constructive criticism then the dialogue as a whole could use some polishing especially since it's such a large part of the game. Especially at the beginning the dialogue is very stiff and unnatural and some editing there would definitely help. Probably trimming out some of the more repetitive stuff would be useful as well. For sure the dialogue, especially at the start of the game, will be changed in one form or another when the game is finished. Doing it now only would be punishing returning players who already have played through the start and most of them won’t play it once again, but it would delay the new updates. I should be thankful for your deep review and the time you spent writing it. It’s good to know what doesn’t work for some players so the next game will change some of the aspects of My Dorm for the better. For example, I won’t do another 28 Lis game ever.
