Am I honestly the only person that was really disappointed with the Chapter 5 Update??
I thought 4.5 had a decent amount of content, AND some storyline choices with everyone's favourite ginger Waifu!
Chapter 5 felt rushed, even though Ocean had a whole YEAR to come up with something longer than around 20 minutes of play time with little action.
Heck, even the recent Being a DIK episode had around an hour and a half of play time, and a really good side-story.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Summer's Gone, I was even a Patreon, but this update was a deal-breaker for me.
I've just turned 47. If Ocean carries on at this rate, I'm going to be 80 by the time Summer's Gone is finished!!!
Of course you're not the only one, just count the latest 1 and 2 star reviews. I'm glad that the Chapter 5 became a kind of filter that finally pushed away those who expected their typical dating sim or a fuckfest from this game. Nah, it's going to be a long, vague, confusing story, and if it's not your thing, that's totally fine.
I'm really surprised you only had 20 minutes of content. Chapter 5 contains 2155 static renders (assuming you didn't replayed the old chapters where another 250 static renders were added). Most images are accompanied by text, some images are shown several times because all the text does not fit in one screen textbox and is divided into several screens with the same image or a few lines of dialogue spoken by different characters but illustrated by the same image. Although some images do not contain text. With all this in mind, it's safe to assume that on average each static screen takes at least 2 seconds to read and watch. I fail to see how one can read and watch it faster than you say "and-one-and-two" and enjoy it.
Let’s say that during your playthrough you only saw 70% of the content, which gives ~1500 screens (images with text). 2 seconds per screen x 1500 screens = 3000 seconds = 50 minutes of content. Unless you gave up on most of the possible events in the previous chapters: no date with Bella, no kiss from Nami, no promise to visit Nia, and I don't know what else is missing from your playthrough.
As for the long development time, well, yeah, there are downsides of Ocean being a solo developer creating a long, twisted, multi-season story-based game.
I once counted the actual total number of images for all the chapters in the Summer's Gone CH5-beta version of the game, there are more than 10,000. The classic completed DPC's game Acting Lessons contains about 5,000 images. I'm not comparing image quality because the games were developed at different times. People may hate AL and DPC for their cheap story tricks
but it is still a very popular and, what's relevant, a completed game. Thus, the unfinished Summer's Gone is already twice as long as Acting Lessons in terms of lines of text and, which is more important for VN, in visual content. JFYI.
But if you can call yourself a "completionist" of sorts, then it's probably really best to quit and forget this game. The final is still very far away unless the dev changes his vision.
