The "open world" and items will be limited to their house, and a single shop (I'm even thinking on making it just a menu, buying online, lol) Also, items = Outfits for the girls, no need for useless quest items.
About the voices, I understand you, but after playing many, maaaany games, I realized that sometimes is not that important, not even for visual novel-like games. there are very few exemptions. Take as examples Ace Attorney and Danganronpa.
The "grunt voice acting" works very nice for some games, for example, in
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, only the important parts at the end of each chapter and some CGs are fully voiced. But trust me, if I could pay voice actresses to voice + 10 characters for a game that just the chapter 2 is +70k words, I would love to it.
If/when there is an AI trained on public-use audio, or made with their respective voice actress consent, I will gladly use it if it fits the characters.
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ALSO, for anyone reading this!
The next public update will be out on January 29th! (0.1.15)