So I was pretty "meh" on this game after my first playthrough of exceedingly pragmatic decision making. The result was a quick tidy "win" with minimal strife and hardly any inconvenience to the protag. The story, while exceptionally well-written for an H-game, felt rather dry & clinical--ostensibly by design--on that sub-60min path to vaguely unsatisfying, but lasting peace & prosperity.
Having "won". I quit out of the game and was about to scan Lutris for another new-to-me game when I wondered, "oh yeah... what about that crazy bitch from 5min into the game that wants protag to flee and leave her nation in a state of duress, or at least upheaval, just cause they were friends for a few years in kindergarten? So I started TSSR back up and pulled that lever....
Whhoooooaaaaaa buddy, abandoning your country and family to get rekt by mongol hordes is subjectively the best decision. The manner & degree to which protag evolves and develops through a fairly dense, multi-faceted "epic" adventure plot was akin to playing an entirely different game. And I say
epic as in
epos, as this path's plot hits most notes associated with the epics of classical poetry. Within 30min I was emotionally invested in protags' efforts to get a foothold in the world, and several hours of engrossed reading later I'm left on the edge of my seat after hitting current end of this path with
I'm assuming there are at least a few other forks in the early game that lead to equally rich, substantially different personas & characters for the protag. I haven't loaded URM or dumped the scripts to check, but kudos to the devs and writers for effectively writing however-many complete separate game plots and stacking 'em all up in this single title. Definitely a far cry from the kind of shallow feel I came away with on my initial "sensible" playthrough.