It seems like the game is just an extended, self-insert wet dream for the developer? I mean, the MC is a late teens AVN developer who is in to anime and DnD, but also a social butterfly who has "always had a girl on each arm". How much more on the nose could you get?
I wonder if games like this could ever be enjoyable from a story-first perspective. Especially harem games have this problem, at least for me, where the blatant wish fulfillment always takes away from the story. I mean, I can see how "lifestyle" games could be interesting, but that's usually not what harem games are about. Like, I could see some kinks used as plot devices, but with other kinks there seems to be a fine line, where the cringy wish fulfillment quickly starts to take away from the story, even for games with obvious effort put into it.
There's games like
Confusion, where a coming-of-age story is made more interesting by the fact that you play as a trans girl. I suspect that it will be fetishized in future updates, because, for a trans girl that's been on blockers since even before puberty, the PC still has very "healthy" erections. But this fetish will still make for an interesting story with the added benefit that the sex scenes won't feel out of place.
And a game like
A Long Journey is story-first in the sense that the sex scenes are basically equivalent to action scenes from non-porn movies. The only real difference to the source material "Passengers" is that the sex scenes are explicit.
But from what I can read in the planned tags and the dev's comments, this is only supposed to be the beginning of the game and there'll be many more characters (all of them women, from what's being teased so far) and there's going to be incest and harem and I can't help but feel like it's going to go down hill from here. I wonder if the story-first status, at least for me, hinges on the fact that the game is vanilla so far and if other kinks might ruin it for me.
But even an almost entirely vanilla romance game like
Leap of Faith has me conflicted, because half of the game is basically just several short romance novels without much connection to the main plot. Purely as a script, without the expectation of this being a choice game, only Steph's path really makes sense and is satisfying (and, surprise, only Steph and Cece got qualitatively good endings honestly). All the other paths seem like fan service and almost turn the suicide plot into an out of place cheap tear jerker.
Like, what was Cece even supposedly saving the PC from, when he always had his very supportive best friend by his side and the first three women he talks to in two years immediately fall for him? Did the PC really need help getting over Steph, when the players already have to pick a LI even before hearing Steph's full story? Weirdly enough Cece's first jump is, when her best friend Linda is at her worst, but she decides that it's the PC out of all people that needs help before she jumps again. Only Linda, Cece and Steph needed saving, really, but the getaway with Lexi would have happened without them either way.
Now
Rebirth on the other hand, to me, is a game, where even the low amount of sex scenes can't hide the fact that all the plot points are nothing more than maledom and harem tropes. Things seem to happen just because and only if I'm
very charitable can I find any plot relevance in most character arcs.
The PC has no motivations or inner monologue and he just does things randomly without any conflict, so his harem can incidentally fall into place. People that like the game very much seem to excuse this by saying that the PC is a pretty cool guy and eh doesn't afraid of anything, but that's not even concretely established in the story and it would be boring anyway.
I guess there's the blatant wish fulfillment again. Only this time without the payoff of actual explicit sex. And maybe that's the crux. Maybe some kinks lend themselves more to bland power fantasies that would never make for a good story.
