MC having personality/characteristics and not needing play-by-play basketball are not exclusive to one another. We already see A LOT of MC's personality/characteristics with how he behaves on the many other plotlines in the game. If you read the quote that I quoted in my post, my worry about the game is that it has too much worldbuilding that the game can sometimes feel bloated.
The dev confirmed that basketball is one of the main plotlines. OK, I can accept that. But the bloat on the worldbuilding still exists with basketball scenes that aren't actually about MC. Scenes like Coach Hill talking about each player and butt inspection. Or the constant cut to the spectators/girls talking about uniforms. Yes they provide more details, but that's bloat content that doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the game.
I can accept that the basketball plotline is important for the game's story. Please don't take this the wrong way, but how much do you know about basketball? I don't mean to be rude, but it's awkward when basketball is important plot wise, gets quite a lot of screen time (we already have two basketball scenes and most likely we're going to get more in the future), but they don't look like proper basketball game at all, and I'm worried that we'd get more basketball that doesn't feel like basketball.
A few examples of what didn't quite make sense with the basketball scenes:
1. There's no such thing as going "full offensive" or "defensive" like what Nia and Mila talked about.
2. No one would really just start the game and take a half court short like what MC did.
3. Not sure why the game is 3 guys 2 girls vs 1 guy 4 girls.
4. From the first game, there's no such thing as Trey being "right side" and MC being "left side" and Ayua being "switcher".
5. Of course this is fixed in the second game where the positions become small forward, etc. But despite MC being the point guard, he was also the one doing the jump ball which is weird.
It's like if you watch a movie about a chef, but there's a cooking scene of making vegetarian dish that somehow used beef and chicken. There's nothing wrong with the plot of the character being a chef, but if the cooking scene is not right, then it detracts from the quality of the movie.
It's much better if you choose something that you actually know well and can portray well in the game (within Daz's limitation). Of course it's too late to change from basketball into something else, but this is also partly why I hope the play-by-play could be trimmed/skipped in the future. You can still use basketball as an important plot without having to go into detail of the game itself.
Personally, I never thought that a girl would be enough to get MC back on track. I always thought that it's more about the humanity aspect that would bring MC back on track. It's just that the game has so many girls that I thought it's already more than enough plotlines in the game that you don't necessarily need to add even more. What interests me is not the girls themselves, but their characters and their plotline with MC. So it's more about how MC would react when he's being forced to do assignments with Bella, or how MC would deal with someone like Victoria, or how about Sonya? It just so happens that you put all those characters into the bodies of girls. I'd still be equally interested in the plot if Victoria is a dude in wheelchair named Bob.
I'll end this on a more positive note. Your game is great so far (obviously not perfect, but there's no such thing as perfection anyway), my only wish is that you don't end up biting more than you can chew. It's nice to have details, but understand that sometimes too much detail ends up as bloat that doesn't improve the game further. You already have a very large cast in this game (MC, tons of girls, multiple teachers, multiple guys, an outsider in that reporter, Bella's mom/aunt, etc), sometimes there's truth in "less is more". Best of luck for the game and keep up the good work.
and so many interesting character - upper classmen + cheerleaders for example I get the feeling this game gets even more intersting and complex.
