Fair enough, main criticism from TID was:
- Too many LIs, i.e., quantity over quality
- Other than one character that was relegated as a side character, no history with the MC, so dev had to introduce them all to MC and us the audience which dragged on. With N&T, a bunch of the LIs had history with the MC making relationship building easier. I.e., less porn logic leaps.
- Given the premise, the story was a non-stop trauma dump
- The sex scenes seemed like the standard animations and were repetitive across LIs
- The endings were pretty bad and threw a lot of the narrative progress out the window
I just started playing today, and haven't finished, but so far focusing on two LI's and making this a more straightforward narrative is a good move. I hope they limit it to 5-6 total main LIs or less and don't shift back to the Choose Your Adventure selection style like TID. That style combined with the number of LIs adds a lot more variable tracking which increases coding and story complexity.
I'm not a fan of the relationship setup, so far, but it's still really early -- i.e., the fact that the MC has no real history with either LI other than occasionally talking to them at work makes them the same as strangers. This means the dev has to work a lot harder at relationship build-up and this time they can't hand waive it away with
Interim Archon Magic™. But, since there are less LIs, there is more time to do this.
Iirc this is the first time ILS has netori LIs, I don't remember any in N&T (pretty sure any LI husbands or boyfriends were dead) and in TID all of the LIs are uninvolved
and if they had partners, they'd be shades. So, the dev has to figure out how to advance the relationships when the LIs partners may be alive and the LIs seem to have a positive relationship with their partners. Also, the MC doesn't seem like the morally ambiguous scumbag type to facilitate 'stealing' the LIs.
