There are several posts talking about the humor, but you two add unique feedback to the conversation that I'm picking out for a general response:
The direction the story will eventually go is both dark and gritty. CC has given us a taste of what's to come with an early scene in which Amaris snaps the neck of some innocent girl (that scene still causes me physical pain...). Additionally, it may be intended as a visual indication of MC's character growth, especially once the risk of actually losing companions becomes real.
I don't want to draw away from this awesome project by bringing up another, but ClassyLemon is a perfect parallel due to how similar both of their writing styles are. In CL's case, he slowly shifted the tone of the story away from non-stop humor/jokes to dealing with some rather gritty topics (i.e.
killing of an LI's family, having two LIs dealing with drug problems, tribal slaughtering).
Personally, I enjoy an ample amount of humor being woven into the narrative of a story. I get to experience dark/grittiness on a daily basis just by living
The jokes, as such, wouldn't be a problem. You've mentioned CL yourself, so I will use that as minor comparison.
While MC might act a bit silly at times in CLs game, he is mostly taking things seriously.
Faced with silly situation, he acts goofy and non-seriously (hunt for snacks for example). Meanwhile, during the other situations (and excluding player dialogue choices), he is relaxed and casual, but
not a buffoon. Granted, that VN is also waaay tonally different to this one, and much, much, MUCH darker, so bit of laughter and goofiness goes a long way to stop it from being too dark and outright cruel (which it sometimes feels like, and I love it for it).
Last 2 updates here, and why I am for the first time complaining, MC has been total buffoon here. He acts not silly, but childish. Take the very first scene of this update, taking a quest. He's being a moron. Not even funny one, just a moron. Hunting dragon, rescuing a princess, it is what his friend would have brought up in previous updates, not MC.
Funny scene I did like was cat rescue. Acting like a silly goof on something so minor is a-ok.
Reason why I used Love&Thunder comparison is because that is exactly how last 2 updates felt for me. Non-stop slapstick humor with no end goal except "isn't this funny, see how funny it is, laugh now, here's more funny, laugh, this is funny, let's laugh again, more funny".
It's humor dialed to 20, for whatever reason.
It felt nothing like previous updates and made me not laugh, but just roll my eyes and hate reading whatever is on screen (laugh scene, obviously, there is nothing else). All that was missing was laugh track every 5 lines of dialogue.
If the whole VN so far was like this, I probably would have dropped it after 2nd update and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But it wasn't, so the massive change in approach to how it's written just seems strange to me.
