It's good. It can be challenging, and the writing is the main thing that's good about it.
I'd say yes. The gameplay is essentially your regular Pokemon game with all that entails, combined with dating VN bits. The characters are well defined, the writing is both fairly clever and funny. The music is also solid, which is pretty rare.
There's a lot of gradual implementation of a lot of things at once, but it's possible that as more and more things are added in with time, eventually the focus will start to turn towards just writing, since all of the other elements will eventually have been fully introduced.
The scope of the game was cut way down to make it more feasible to actually complete. It's one year of school instead of three planned for the finished product. You can currently play three weeks, which gives you enough time to get at least one relationship event with all of the characters who have them. You can gain progress on your relationship by texting with people, studying with them at lunch, spending free time together, or going to the same classes as them. Plus some choices in dialogue matter for that sometimes.
The game is a sandbox to an extent, so the rate of storyline events is pretty arbitrary -- i mean, any of these "1 week" updates could just as easily be "2 weeks" updates with story events happening every other day instead of continuously, and the player having freedom to pick their own actions on remaining days. Which is to say, it doesn't mean every future update has to follow this model, and the game won't need 50+ updates to cover the whole year.
