I watched a tutorial on visual novel design not too far back and there were two competing philosophies on how to design it. The first was like a spider web. The first choice is at the very center and every choice takes the story in a different direction. While moving through the connections of the web, you might eventually find yourself moving in the same direction that your first choice would have taken you in general to purpose of designing like this is for the impact of your decisions to be felt from that very first decision. That seems to be the philosophy of this game. What more often is seen is the other model, the tangled branch, where there are only a few different outcomes in mind and thus the story moves in one direction with the decisions branching back into the same storyline. While impactful on a relationship or two, the decisions only will be felt for a scene or two at most before the story reconnects and keeps going in the same direction. This is much easier to deal with in the long term. For visual shorthand using the same developer, the Web would be Being a Dik and the Branch would be his previous game Acting Lessons. There are people with problems with both of those games for valid reasons, but you are never going to please everybody. One thing that I think is an interesting decision in this game as well as some others is that it shows you the decisions that you can't make. I don't think that this is a good design principle. If you can't make that decision because of previous decisions it should just be missing. This one little change would help the game quite a bit, because graying out things and making them unclickable only calls attention to the content that is locked off rather than keeping the attention on the story.
