You're being incredibly biased in your comment as everything that you just said would also apply to Ocean. He also has another game which has several sex scenes in it and has completely reworked both games. "Building tension is bad unless I decide it isn't" Is a ridiculous position, dude. As far AS DPC, yeah, fuck the mini games, fuck the months spent reworking the god damn fucking cell phone, artistically he has fallen behind, but it terms of actual development, he is the king. There are better writers, Drifty by continents of separation, there are better artists, but for this specific genre he is the king of college/coming of age VN's. He has more subs than these two make per month and it is largely bc early on he WAS cranking out the quality content. And it's bc he didn't waste time on unnecessary rendering. Granted, he just wastes all that time x10 on shit that no one cares about now, but he's a millionaire and not a damn thing we can say about it will change things.
There are HUGE sections where they're spending days if not a week just on renders on non-sexual content just for one scene where sexualizing the scene makes NO fucking sense and takes you out of the moment. I'm also talking the type of content that is ironically targeted at those like me and I'm calling it a waste. The typical VN is like, what, well over than 10 lines of dialogue per render on average. There are sections of this VN where the inverse is true. And it's NOT the sections where you'd WANT that additional time sunk.
The point is that there is a massive and unnecessary waste of time that I could easily argue hurts the story and character development on top of slowing development down. I'm completely fine with the pacing and storytelling. It's the inflated render counts that I'm having an issue with. They could do a whole hell of a lot more with just a little less. Show off how good of an artist you are when it really matters. Not during a back and forth about dead parents or bad movies. Work smarter, not harder, you know...