Just finished playing for the first time and I don't know how this game doesn't have more support on patreon. It just gets better and better as it progresses.
My thoughts almost exactly - I discovered this and fired it up and was like ehhhh then didn't play it for a few days, burned through something else, happened to try it again not expecting much...
The thing with this game is the beginning kind of sucks - this is tough love okay, no one get offended - but then suddenly it finds its stride and it's AMAZING! I think in the very beginning, the MC is a real turnoff (who wants to be a kind of dorky weird elf douch which is what he looks like at first) and you don't meet any of the really smoking hot LIs in the very beginning. Once you show up at the ninja school and try to sign up shit takes off big time.
One minor criticism - I am not the hugest fan of how the LIs personality (mainly their dialogue) evolves - I could do without them suddenly all being like "OHHH YEAH... I'M SUCH A CUM SLUT" etc. like maybe keep the whole 'kind of naive and shy' thing going. Probably a semi-decent analogy would be the french chick from lucky paradox... even when she is being a complete whore she still maintains this facade of decency and keeps insisting that you are a pervert and it's all you causing the raunchy things to happen.
I also suspect some people go into this expecting there to be a lot more ...less consensual... content, because they see incubus and just assume it will be 1000x darker than it is... In reality this is kind of like a decent anime with hardcore sex scenes added to it. (I didn't say hentai, because again it's not like, as fucked up as you would expect hentai to be, and the story, characters, humor, etc. are excellent.)
I FUCKING LOVE THE LITTLE DETAILS like when the chat goes away and the characters make a face or kind of look sideways at something with their eyes before the conversation continues, it is so effective at setting the mood appropriately and injecting humor in key situations.
But yeah overall this is like a 11/10. I need to do a review on it at some point but I need to take the time to do it justice. Easily top 10 or 20 or so of all adult VNs I have experienced.