It blows my mind that devs haven't realized how visually BORING displaying a text conversation over the phone is. It must be so ubiquitous in real life that they don't consider what the actual benefits are of presenting it that way and just do it because it's familiar.
If they actually went through the thought process it would go: ''OK, so we need to do a bit of info dump on the player. This is the nerdy LI's time to shine. She's super cute and stuff so do we meet her in person somewhere so she can have a new outfit on or we get to see her blushing since the MC invited her out of the blue or something? No, let's make sure we don't display her visually in any way. Not even a profile picture on our phone. Ok, so we've made it visually boring. Now, that we've done that, there's a chance the player might be tempted to speed through this conversation since it's so visually boring and all. No problem, since we're doing a boring text conversation let's leverage that by putting in unskippable delays in the text conversation FOR THE REALISM of waiting for a reply in a text conversation. Now they'll HAVE to spend an amount of time of MY CHOOSING in this visually boring info dump text conversation I've constructed for them! It makes perfect sense that after a whole game of letting the player set the pace of clicking through conversations, we take that ability away from them during a sequence where we don't even have eye candy in the form of renders of beautiful women to look at.''
Man, do I wish devs would stop and question their decisions a bit more. It makes me feel like the one sane man in a crazy world when stuff like this gets normalized for no obvious benefit.
If they actually went through the thought process it would go: ''OK, so we need to do a bit of info dump on the player. This is the nerdy LI's time to shine. She's super cute and stuff so do we meet her in person somewhere so she can have a new outfit on or we get to see her blushing since the MC invited her out of the blue or something? No, let's make sure we don't display her visually in any way. Not even a profile picture on our phone. Ok, so we've made it visually boring. Now, that we've done that, there's a chance the player might be tempted to speed through this conversation since it's so visually boring and all. No problem, since we're doing a boring text conversation let's leverage that by putting in unskippable delays in the text conversation FOR THE REALISM of waiting for a reply in a text conversation. Now they'll HAVE to spend an amount of time of MY CHOOSING in this visually boring info dump text conversation I've constructed for them! It makes perfect sense that after a whole game of letting the player set the pace of clicking through conversations, we take that ability away from them during a sequence where we don't even have eye candy in the form of renders of beautiful women to look at.''
Man, do I wish devs would stop and question their decisions a bit more. It makes me feel like the one sane man in a crazy world when stuff like this gets normalized for no obvious benefit.