Wow, this is such an amazing game! Didnt played it because of the engine and the design for a long time .. not that im against it or that theres anything bad about it (i dont have a clue about engines) i just didnt really looked for non-renpy games. But boy, i couldnt care less about anything like that when i finally started playing.
Or at least since the moment when CJ did meet his dad, it was kinda like a big LETS GO! not only for cj but for me too while playing. Its kinda funny while reading the prologue and the part with former? cj? and Cro the scene kinda annoyed me as i just saw it at some spacey freaky stuff i didnt really cared about at this point and didnt understood a lot about. While in retrospect the prologue is amazing and very interesting which is kinda fascinating.
It seems like the game was able to change my interrests which speaks highly for the avn imo.
Same thing with harem-setups, i dont hate them and played a lot of avns with harems but they always kinda break my immersion but this game manages to make it feel natural and not just like a big fuckfest.
And i really really love the characters in this game and how fundamental different the girls feel. I guess Vic is my favorite but all of them are amazing, cant wait for ashleys arc too, theres something about her and her whole family, even her dad and mom are amazing lol. Was just thinking about who's my second favorite but i really cant tell, all of the ring-LI's and sarah have something special yet so different about them that it just feels bad to rank them.
But the real outstanding performers are the "Villains", esp Cro but Winter and Carpo were great too, sometimes just hilarious, just the right amount of crazy (very crazy) and their vocabulary is awesome. Love the philosophical stuff the game contains embodied by the goddesses too, like is there pure evil? Does everyone break at some point due to too much suffering (Could sarah become like cro in early chapters over enough eons of suffering and longing?)
In general the whole "Love"-theme seems interresting in this game, as it seems like (to me at least) that all the goddesses went crazy over time due to some forms of love and longing/desire. Its sweet when you and the love of youre life feel only whole together.. but only if this stays like that forever or stops together. Otherwhise one part is left back and broken which seems to have happened.
So it seems like our group is not only fighting against their opponents aka the goddesses, they are at the same time fighting against becoming the goddesses themselves i guess. And at least for leah so far and partially vic (who seems to kept "calm" by her mom) that will be a hard fight, Leah already announced that shes ready to kill the whole planet for their group to live. Jamie (and maybe cj) seem to be the only ones who are able to see this problem at the moment and i guess it will be important in the future that Jamie's morals lead Tsukiko and maybe the whole group.
CJ is such a great protagonist too, i think its hilarious when people in this thread label him as dumb/dense/weak/wimp/indecisive or whatever. He is not.
Of course he's supposed to be seen like that and even his best friends like Jamie dont get it. All his dumb doofus behavior is a charade, like a tool used to distract and i think the only one who fully gets it so far is Victoria and even she could only grasp the full extent of it after seeing the sequence of his past with his mother trying to kill him/them in combination with his reaction to theresa and behavior towards herself at the evening later.
In a way CJ is probably even more calculated than Jamie even when its just subconsciously. But we were shown more and more often that seemingly random shit he does isnt random at all, it the opposite, the conclusion of a great empath which his friends (and apparently quite a few posters here) just dont get and he doesnt want them too either.
He does whatever it takes to make his friends feel better which includes letting his friends tease him for being dense, a puppy or whatever makes them smile because the true reason for his behavior is far too dark and brutal for anyone of them to know about.
My only nitpicky critism with the story so far is the Jamie development esp considering the 8 month timeskip. I dont mind slow-burn and lets be real there are still valid reasons for Jamie for not being sure about being in a sexual relationship with the guy she loves when he has unlimited other girls. Insecurity, jealousy, dreams from the childhood all can play a part in her considerations.
But at this point CJ has already fucked Mizue and it seems like will even have sex with Tsukiko earlier than with Jamie which kinda ruins Jamie as a LI a bit for me. Its similar to slowburn-romances in games where you read/watch dreaming about sex with your li before it actually happened, it kind spoils it and makes it less special when it finally happens.
I mean its Jamie, she and vic are the closest, the oldest friends with the longest slowburn in the game and the first time we see (a version of) her having sex is in a sex-video Mizue made with CJ which CJ watches while fucking one of her maids .. its just felt kinda off to me and i would prefered somehting like this to happen after things with Jamie got sorted out and not before.
A funny/odd thing btw is that i dont really care about Jamie (more of a good friend) and Mizue (more of a casual fwb) as real LI's, while im at the same time really amazed by Tsukiko in this regard. I think that speaks volumes for the writing.
