- Nov 13, 2021
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In the context of having played through fully and reviewed the code up to 0.08, so I can't say for certain if these change in 0.09 or 0.10:
Elsewhere stories do not do anything but occasionally give a little extra context. They don't open new girls' stories directly, those happen as the 'day' variable increases, which happens automatically when you finish just about any scene (including both girls' story scenes and Elsewhere scenes). That's why Lightman's mod just shows you all the Elsewhere scenes for the first couple 'chapters' without increasing the 'day' variable.
There are a few bits of story that require certain stages of some combination of girls, but they're mostly just small extra scenes, not anything heavily plot-relevant. I don't know if 0.09 or 0.10 have more relevant scenes requiring multiple girls, though, I haven't looked through the code since 0.08.
But fundamentally, it doesn't matter. Which story you play is a fake, meaningless choice, because there's no meaningful connection between the stories (up through 0.08). They're all separate unrelated stories. From what I've seen of 0.09 and 0.10, while some of the other girls start appearing in girls' stories, it's still mostly cameos (which makes sense, since those extras have to account for people who haven't played the other girl's story, or who haven't progressed far enough). Play them in whatever order you want. The main purpose of the pointless sandbox is to ignore girls you don't care about (which could have been coded a lot easier as a "talk to [Girl X]/don't talk to [Girl X]" choice, which would have avoided the entire pointless pseudo-sandbox), and follow stories of girls you do care about (right up until you eventually turn them into Qi). Given how things are going, though, ignoring girls is likely to get you a Worse End (as opposed to the best option of a lonely Bad End that you're already likely to get if you do everything "right").
You will definitely get more content cycling through the girls than following one girl's content to the end at a time; if you foillow a single girl to the end of their current story before starting any other girls' stories, you will miss the extra scenes from any other girls when the timing of those extra scenes comes around. At one point I figured out an optimal path (in 0.08) to see all the extra scenes, but it was more work than it was really worth, particularly given how ambivalent I already was about the game at the time.
