I don't really see that anybody is defending the result of the update to be honest.
I'm slightly cross about the fact, that that this topic went from being 95% useless to being 100% uesless. I couldn't find a single post which talks about the update. What are the changes beyond the first day in Jenny's story? Have there been any major bugs or does it really run as well, as it seems at first glance?
I'm actually starting to think that hardly anybody who is writing here has played the update in the first place...
As someone who's been following this game since before the pandemic, v21.0.0 is a colossal disappointment and feels super rushed. The vast majority of the previous scenes and plot lines are no longer accessible despite the assets being present in the game's files.
The wider screen and higher resolution are nice, but I had no problem with how the game looked before the changes. The new locations look great, but there's nothing to do with them in the game's current build, so including them serves no purpose gameplay-wise. The addition of that little room in the MC's house doesn't improve anything either, it just makes navigating through a location with a lot of stuff to click through already even more tedious. Jenny's new art in the intro is just... bad. The proportions are off, the pose is awkward, and it looks like DC copy-pasted her arms in the pose where she's yawning. I don't know why her artwork looks so bad there because she looks fine everywhere else. Also, if this update was meant to focus on the household and the first day of college, why does Debbie's route still use her old art assets? I look through DC's stream here and there, and I've seen him draw new Debbie art, so it doesn't make sense for her route to not be at the same level as Jenny's.
On the technical side, the game runs about as well as any Renpy game should run. I think people are overstating how much of an improvement that part of the update is. Maybe people just got used to how poorly the game ran beforehand, so "average" gets confused with "good".
All in all, this was bad. To me, the worst part is that there's plenty of stuff to like about Summertime Saga, but all the positives are dragged down by poor management and a lack of a clear end goal. I don't see a future where this game ever gets finished because it's doubtful that DC even wants this game to be finished due to how lucrative it is as a crowd-funded WIP. I'm following this game now more out of morbid curiosity than anything else. That said, there are tons of other good games on this site if you're willing to look, so I'm not stressing out about this. It just sucks seeing something that I liked before turning out like this.
