I'm satisfied but I feel that Amazon is losing his edge.
Game design-wise, he peaked at Todoroki. That game had perfect pacing between item hunting and scenes, and there was a much smoother corruption curve. But this Natsuki game is plagued with some mind-boggling awful design decisions.
>the first hour(s) of the game is all about fetching quests and talking with every NPC,
the game gives little diegetic indication about who to talk to and where to find what item, you basically brute force your way by just picking everything and talking with everyone
>after the first shrine the game gives you a vague hint about getting a scene with every "major villager", and you can easily miss it because some of them need to be talked to multiple times in sequence (this is a straight-up point-and-click adventure game sin), others NPCs are kinda hidden (it took me a while to notice that the innkeeper was awake at night, I just assumed he was sleeping like every other NPC)
>after reaching the second shrine, the game jumps the shark and lets you unlock all the shrines and go full corruption in an instant. If you want any shred of pacing, you force yourself to "unlock shrine > talk with everyone at day > talk with everyone at night > go through festivals > repeat". It becomes a CG hunter, with the only gameplay being the cardio between walking towards each NPC.
I have no idea why he would make such decisions, maybe it was an oversight and somehow I managed to complete every favor before unlocking the second shrine. Simple roadblocks between shrines and spreading the fetch quests between each corruption stage would improve the game so much.
Some nitpicks.
>the night and day mechanic suffers equally to his first Yuuka game, it's half-baked and the night has less than 10% of all the scenes, all the other scenes overwhelmingly take place by day or in the festivals. I believe it solely exists to stretch the playtime. Of course, you will roam the entire map at night to see if you are missing something after each time you improve her corruption.
>there are preggo variations for every maxed corruption scene but the game locks you from the mechanic until you have seen 95% of all the game scenes. WHY? WHY NOT INTEGRATE IN THE GAME BY THE TIME SHE IS FULLY CORRUPTED?
Thanks to the translator, he added a cheat that allows you to get it early, I was missing one mini-scene and I couldn't be bothered to roam the entire map to find it.
Somehow this game pacing ended up worse than his previous Yuuka game which felt so short and half-assed despite having a decent size of scenes for its short duration.