To be fair I haven't played the game in like a year or so so the exacts aren't clear anymore and I'm mostly going on what I remember and the sort of vibes I remember having towards this plot point and some of plot in general so some of ths stuff might contradict the story as it is. But that's why I said it felt like a missed opportunity to me as in an ideal world the story would be a bit different to accomidate it, because when that bit was revealed I remember thinking they would've done more with it rather than it just kinda being the setup to a "slavery is secretely legal for the rich and powerful and Al's mom actually lived and was made into a sex slave isn't that fucked up?" moment. When I did a second playthrough part of me started thinking of ways they could've expanded on that which is what kinda soured me on that point because it could've been a neat twist to reveal a sort of hidden aspect to the story.
Anyway I could've phrased it better but I meant more like the apple being the only solution to the problem they faced was the part that was lied about/made up not that the crest itself was fake. And with Mark that's a prime example of something I kinda misremembered, reading a earlier comment of mine in this thread my idea wasn't that he was involved from the start but that maybe he's actually exacerbating their symptoms and maybe even that he's slightly altering their personality through manipulating the crest somehow. For example I did a quick glance at the prologue again and it seems like he knew they had succubus blood from the moment he met them and only revealed that once he knew Al wouldn't be able to handle both girls. Which really gives the impression he went after them specifically because he know they had the crests and would've backed off if Al actually could easily handle both as he couldn't then use that as a way to get closer to the girls. And if I remember right in his scenes with Iris she didn't seem to know the crest could be made to reappear while Mark did so he presumably knows more about the crest than the average person does which is what prompted me to think of this line of thought.
Like sort of the idea would be that Mark isn't just trying to steal them from Al by manipulating them but that he's also using the crest to alter their behavior to make them willing to do prostitution and into his sort of ideal women. The government lie angle would either be that they made the crests themselves and spread it to people and succubi are only able to activate it in people who have the crest or can replicate the process to make the crest because it uses their magic as a basis. Or that they're doing something to cause women with succubi blood to "awaken"(Maybe even tacitly allowing succubi to spread it around to take the first game into account) so that they would go to the city to get what they'd assume is the only cure only to end up in debt and eventually turn to prostitution or adventurers like Mark trying to pay it off so they could be made into slaves. They wouldn't even have had to make Al aware of it and could've had it been revealed to the girls by Mark after they fell for him or something like that.
Also yeah the ending variations were a little disappointing to me too. One variant that really sticks out to me as a little silly is having one girl fall and one not and then marrying the fallen one. You'd think if Al tried to marry a fallen Elza that Lyne would try to dissuade or warn him about Elza and Mark and not just let it happen. Like I guess there might be a way you could play through the game where Lyne wouldn't explicitly know like failing to qualify for the orc raid quest but she'd have to have at least some suspicion of it even then.
And to be clear this isn't me like shitting on the game or anything I thought it was pretty enjoyable but I just kinda have this tendency to sort of overthink minor bits of plot stuff like this when I play games like this and felt like sharing what I thought of this one bit of story that kinda made me go down a little rabbit hole. Like I said before that it brought down the experience but that's more on me than the game itself, like it's not a "this plot was bad I didn't like it" sort of thing and more of a "I really liked it but I kinda let myself down by imagining how much better the game could've been".
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