That's a kind of a problem with the game itself, you don't have a goal stimulating you to see everything. It gets too repetitive, it's repulsive when you have to attempt tens of walkthroughs just to see alternating scenes.
Gallery was giving at least certain people a small reward for finding a scene. The sense of “I'm not doing same thing all over again, I'm gradually adding new scenes to my collection». Now it's gone, and you don't even feel like you're good that you found something.
While I do understand that most porn games have the recollection/scene collecting mechanic, for ToA I feel like the right call is to just have the main focus be the story and dialog, reminds me stuff like Evenicle, where the art and game is good, but the story just elevate it to a whole new level, I see the same in ToA, I usually try my best to immersively read every.single.sentence said by every character instead of just speeding to collect scenes, which is what the recollection mechanic basically incentivize you to do, you collect scenes and move on to the next line of games to collect scenes, and on and on
If the game had a strong plot, it would at least motivate you to look for scenes because they're giving you some new stories. But the game is more of a big collection of short stories that are independent and not great themselves, they ONLY get interesting when they explain you the hentai scene.
This I kind of have to agree, the game doesn't feel like it has a clear goal in mind, just Hiro going around the most fucked-up area of the woods, meeting the most degenerate of dickgirls, just so happens to stumple into the main plot while trying to/trying not to get stuffed by a well-hung humanoid, still I would say reading the text is very entertaining to me personally, enough to take it slow and try not to hunt for every scene the the moment I meet a character, and just enjoy reading the dialog
The game could also have more diverse mechanics. I remember the Lust Doll game, it rewards you with new spells that actually give you some absolutely unique effects when you reach some part pf a story. Also it has much more quests that have an actual plot (in ToA your quest usually looks like “help Trudy get wrecked for magic or something Idk, just find him some cock”). I think the difference with ToA is there's a tonn of characters, and making some complicated quest lines that don't work the way of “go there, there, and there, congrats” with all of them around is more difficult.
ToA has exactly one thing like that and that is when you fight the snek goddess on top the mountain, you get one blessing then you fight her, if you don't have it you can't fight her, so yeah it does need some incentive for you to interact with the characters, other than the interactions themselves the story seems very...disconnected, it would be fun if every single one of them get like an introduction, have them being weaved into the story in interesting ways would be fun, instead of you just stumbling into them by happenstance and momentarily bend over
Overall, I think that for the current state of the game the best thing would be a new alternative to gallery and progress screen. Some notebook that is teasing you by showing what cool content you can see, hyping you up, eliminating the feeling you're on the fool's errand of going through the game again and again when you can fap to 25% of it and leave. There are various ways of doing them, but they all need some work done.
Yeah I agree, ToA isn't really a game that focuses on just having hentai scenes to fap on so having a gallery and progress tracker just does a disservice to the dialog
I would expand on your idea by having your notebook accumulate interesting things that people say about an area/person/creature, like you can go around the town square and stumble upon a gossip about a random area, then Boom your Notebook has a line saying "I wonder what this area/creature/person has that the populis seems so interested in"