@Rex Blue Can you kindly fix your review of the game? One thing for sure, don't just make up stuff, this game is not a kinetic novel. The story is almost linear with no hard branching but it is definitely not kinetic novel as per this site rule. The first sentence of your review can potentially mislead those who reads it. The choices in this game affect relationship points, alter the flow of the game and/or offer variations to the scenes, among other things.
I fail to see how I'm making anything up. Just because a game has choices, doesn't mean the choices actually lead to different story outcomes. As near as I could tell with my complete playthrough of the current patch, every single choice in the game bottlenecks back to the same path within a scene or two. Every choice is essentially an opt-in or opt-out choice for seeing scenes with certain girls. To me, that is a kinetic novel, as the choices never give different content, only choose to reveal or hide it.
That said, I only opted in to every scene with the girls because I wanted to see everything. Does the story dramatically shift if you skip certain scenes?
There's a part in the VN where you choose to either stay at school or head home which leads you to different scenes and allows you to meet certain characters earlier. Pretty sure just having that excludes it from being a Kinetic Novel.
As far as I was concerned with that scene, leaving school was the "opt-in" option as you got to see a scene with the succubi/your mom. The scene with Tor and Candy can be witnessed later in the story with I think a one point drop in Candy's lust since you can't ask her about the scene during the illusion training later on. Unless that one point lust drop locked a different scene, that didn't feel like enough to consider it a choice based VN rather than a kinetic novel to me.
One route had more content, the other had less. There was an opt-in/opt-out dichotomy, obscured though it might have been. As far as I'm concerned, staying at school was the opt-out choice where you'd see less content and gain nothing, you just had to dig for it a bit to notice.
Perhaps our disagreement is what constitutes a choice-based VN vs a kinetic novel? As far as I'm concerned, if your choices only hide content and never show one scene to the exclusion of another, the story is a kinetic novel. A choice-based VN requires multiple paths/multiple playthroughs in order to see all the content. That might only be two branches, but as near as I could tell Stray Incubus only had one, with choices only hiding content or changing two or three lines of dialogue. Is two or three lines of dialogue enough of a change that you'd consider a story a choice-based VN?
Regardless, being a kinetic novel isn't a bad thing in my mind. I rated the game four stars based on how the early game has a collection of scenes that barely feel connected by a plot. The game improves dramatically once the ninja school becomes the focal point, as it focuses the plot.
Also generically speaking, it doesn't really follow the review guidelines because you simply reviewing the story and characters of the game, and hardly anything about the game itself.
My review covers the gameplay (discussing what flavor of visual novel the game subscribes to), the characters, the story and the visuals. What else would you cover in a VN, a game with only images, story, and characters?