I wonder if anyone is ever going to be able to convince the developer that the gameplay of his game is completely crap?
I'm serious. The concept of the game is interesting. The characters are appealing. The porn is hot. But the gameplay -ALL of it- is terrible. And the reason it's terrible is actually pretty simple: there's absolutely NO balance whatsoever and it throws EVERYTHING out of whack. Seriously, everything could be made fine with just the tweaking of some numbers, but until it is, it's insufferable.
For one thing, almost EVERYTHING in the game is 10-100 times more grindy than it needs to be. Want an example? Here's a simple one for starters:
Say you want to fuck your sister Stephanie (who wouldn't?). Because she's both Family and Young, you need BOTH Mind Control and SymPathic Link before your character can even find her attractive, and you need Mind Control anyway to Suppress her opposition to incest (up to tier 2 to use Mindcraft). Before anything else, that's going to set you back $2750. Money is very hard to make efficiently; generally you can beg $40 per week of most of the girls if you have enough Favor with them, while working or patrolling the neighbourhood is a pain. Then, before you can actually BUY those powers, you have to raise your Discipline level not once, but twice. The first time will cost you 100 Initiative Influence, and because the cost escalates each time, the second one will cost you 200, meaning you have to grind up 300 Initiative Influence just to get your first 2 extra powers (never mind if there's any other powers you might want instead, like Flight, both for its useful gameplay benefits and so you can find Larson attractive- that'll now cost you 400 Initiative Influence). Initiative Influence is INCREDIBLY hard to grind up early on before you can sign up for Initiative Work, and even after that it trickles in at a glacial pace. So anyway, once you manage to get yourself attracted to Stephanie, you have to Mindcraft her to suppress her family ties so she'll be open to fucking you. First you have to repeatedly Dominate her to build up enough Control to be able to cast Mindcraft on her. Because she opposes Dominate with her Willpower, the practical way to do this is to repeated use Break Will on her to mindblast her until she's mentally crippled enough to Dominate. This is going through a LOT of energy, btw, and may take several sessions. Then once you have the Mindcraft on her, you have to wait for it to be complete, which requires you to stack even MORE Control on her to make it happen in a timely fasion (she gains a completion % equal to your current Control level per day). Once you've suppressed her family ties, you then have to actually make her like you. This means grinding up her Love stat with interactions until it's high enough for her to let you start grinding up her Lust stat as well. You have to get Lust to I think either 60 or 80 before she'll actually have sex with you, depending on when and how.
Does that honestly sound reasonable? Unlocking ultimate character weapons in Final Fantasy X wasn't this much of an ordeal. No, not even the one that required you to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row.
That's the biggest problem with the entire game: everything is INCREDIBLY grindy. You have to do actions over and over and over again to slowly build up monumental amounts of stats and resources a miniscule amount at a time, a matter only made worse by the RNG that exists mainly to waste your time by giving you a chance of failing at almost anything and usually penalising you when you do (constantly being "Too distracted today" when trying to take classes is just BULLSHIT). Trying to raise your stats to reduce the instances of failure is not only piling more grind on top of existing grind (FRACTAL grind!) but it's also pretty pointless- I once got my Concentration up to level 5 or 6 and I was STILL regularly failing to pay attention in class, forcing me to constantly save-scum. I've been keeping an eye on the game for many, many versions, and the worst thing the developer EVER did was gate power acquisition behind Discipline rank- before that you only needed money to acquire powers (increasing your Charm limit and consequently your number of actions per time segment), rather than having to grind hundred and hundreds and hundreds of points of Influence. Why did he even do that? Does it make the game more enjoyable? No, it makes it insufferable, but I guess he thinks it adds "challenge", which gives it more "gameplay".
Making the game intentionally difficult to enjoy is not "gameplay".
That's for one thing; this is the other thing:
The second problem is how bad the balance of activities is. Most of the content in the game is quite pointless because, with the grindiness forcing you to try and maximise efficiency in everything, there's simple NO reason to do most of it when you can exploit much easier ways of playing. You will NEVER want to Discuss with or Hang Out with a girl for the simple reason that the Charm costs are COMPLETELY excessive compared to the actual reward for doing so, unless you're literally doing it just for the hell of it. See, the single biggest balance misstep the dev put in the game was the mobile phone, which is COMPLETELY broken. Why would you spend 2 Charm to Discuss with a girl to gain your Leadership in Favor and your Natural Social in Love when you can just use the phone to immediately gain your Natural Social in Favor, Love or even Lust for 1 Charm each without needing to waste time grinding up Leadership? Hang Out is even worse, it costs THREE Charm AND an amount of your Favor, and only gives you your Natural Social+Leadership in Love, which is again much MUCH less than just using your phone to Flirt with her 3 times. Actual Dates are the worst of all- they cost even MORE Favor, they advance time so you not only lose the time segment but for most girls you have to spend ANOTHER 3 Charm asking them for a Large Favor to get them to skip class (some character builds won't even HAVE a total of 6 Charm to spend until they level up a lot) and the Love they give (which is the ONLY thing they give) is not only again radically inferior to what you can get by just abusing the phone, but is dependant on your stats and where you take them (going for a Workout gives you extra love equal to your Physical stat while going to the Library bases it on Mental) except some girls don't like certain dates, so if they don't like the date you have good stats for it gets even MORE pointless. If the game was properly balanced you'd only be able to Text, Flirt and Sext with a girl over the phone once per day, rather than once per time segment- but it's so grindy that if he changed it to work like that it'd be COMPLETELY unplayable.
As a result of the horrible cost/reward imbalances, this is how you get with a girl who doesn't require any special traits to get with (e.g Sandra, Kelly, Samantha etc): every time you meet them, Chat about one of the 4 subjects she likes to gain Favor equal to your Natural Social (hope you went for a Social build or the grind is going to be even WORSE). She'll leave after you Chat with her once, so this will take several days. Always socialise at lunch in the hopes of meeting her for a bit of a boost. Don't try anything else, you can't even USE Discussion until she likes you a lot (not that you'd want to since it's worse than just chatting) and even trying to Discuss with her with just make you LOSE Favor because why not? Once you reach 40 Favor, she'll stop running away after a single interaction, so you can Chat with her about all 4 of the topics she likes to speed things up a bit. Once you get to 60 Favor, you can FINALLY ask her for a small favour, which should be her phone number, and from then on you can just spam her with phone messages at every time segment to raise first her Love, then her Lust. If you meet her in person you can do a couple of physical actions, but all of them except Hug are are so cost-inefficient (you need to expend Charm to ask her to go somewhere private first for any of them other than Hug unless you can convince Larson to loosen standards on public intimacy) that you're better off just sticking to your phone most of the time. Then once it gets high enough, you can bang her. No actual real "interaction" required whatsoever- in fact, trying to actually interact with a girl before you get to the physical stage only slows you down, or can even send you backwards. This is how badly balanced the game is.
The OTHER huge balance misstep was requiring you to ask a girl for a Large Favor to get her to do any activity with you that advances time (because you have to skip class, since you never meet any of the girls outside of school). This costs, as mentioned, THREE Charm. And that's before you have to spend more Charm on the activity itself (Dating or banging her is another 3 Charm). This is just such a huge oversight that it's baffling that it hasn't been picked up on and corrected. It's also what makes the incest so appealing, since you don't have to do this with your sister or mother when you're at home with them- which is presumably why all the extra grind to get and use powers was put in to counterbalance it. Can't be having FUN now, can we?
As for changing a girl's personality via corrupting her, decreasing her inihibitions etc... see the section on grinding. It takes a LOT of work to make any meaningful change to a girl.
I recall trying to discuss these issues (and they're REALLY obvious, glaring issues) with the developer in the chat fields on his Patreon a few years ago, but he rather rudely dismissed me with something along the lines of "It's my game and if you're not a Patron I don't have to care about anything you say". Of course I'm NOT a Patron, nor would I want to be because the gameplay is frankly a mess and the developer doesn't seem to either realise or care (I get the feeling he doesn't actually PLAY his own game to see what it's actually like beyond bug testing), but I still think it's a shame that the game is basically only playable when you have cheats on to let you give yourself as much resources as you need.
