Man what a ride, I just finally tried this one out over the weekend. I am so conflicted... this is one of those games you hear about constantly, I mean this game is so popular and established that other games include little cameo / easter egg things by showing the ripples title screen in the background on a screen or poster in random scenes... but I had never actually sat down and played it before. I was really curious to see what all the hype is about.
As far as I know, the game was started in 2019. So I guess my biggest question is, how is the story not further developed at this point? I was thinking it would be very very far along at this point - nope - I played through an entire run in a few hours. Granted, you could go back and replay it a few different ways, since it seems that pursuing certain characters effectively cockblocks you from pursuing others. However, most of the characters I did not pursue... I simply don't have any interest in pursuing. For example, the literal grandma who keeps flirting with the MC... and the various moms that seem to have the hots for the MC... really just not my thing. I have said this before but I will continue saying it, it makes no sense that the MC would pursue all these women 20-40 years older than him when he has a legion of hotter younger girls in his own age range interested in him. The only thing I would maybe try on a second run is pursue Krystal/Daphne and not worry about whether that will piss off Darci, and pursue Jessica instead of Skylar (only because I did all of Skylar's stuff already on my first run, which seems to have locked out some Jessica scenes.)
The quality is pretty amazing, clearly a lot of effort has been put in here, and it shows - the cinematic sequences with little details setting up scenes are nice, and the animations are very high quality. The story is also pretty funny, I laughed insanely hard at a number of scenes, like some of the exchanges with Darci, Riley's shenanigans (go go gadget copter!) - etc.
I am just... shocked that now, as 2023 draws to a close, we are only 6 episodes deep and the MC has time traveled I think twice. In a game where the main story is supposed to be about time travel lol.
This game also seems to suffer massively from "let's add more LIs" syndrome... like dude why are you adding a Dani path in ep 6 when you still don't have main characters fully developed yet? We have not even banged Darci yet and she is pretty much the first LI introduced to the MC, and fairly integral to the story. Don't get me wrong, Dani is hot sure but like... holy fuck I would rather have a handful of completely developed LIs with a full set of scenes than like a million LIs with a couple of scenes each, especially since the first couple scenes are generally all really tame. You can always add more in later, but finish what you started first, IMO. And characters like Dani are not really advancing the core storyline, which seems to have taken the back burner at this point.
IDK curious to see what others think - am I the only one saying this is kinda short for being ~4 years in?