sounds great to me .... lmao
But that's not a visual novel. It's just a porn kinetic novel where you click to progress the story, not to influence it.
I don't agree with this part. Having sex with a character is as much as development as going on a date, sharing a kiss, having a discussion or anything you can think. Some characters are casual towards sex, others are not. In other words, sex itself is just another feature of a story. If the story is all sex related is important, otherwise is not.
This is F95zone, of course sex is core of the game.
I know those game you mention, I played them both many years ago. They are, at most, fine in my opinion. Not because of a single girl ending. Because they are very straightforward and boring love stories. Best VN I can think, love sex and relationships are part of it and important but not the only drive. Muvluv, Steins Gate, Fata Morgana.
I mention them because they're iconic in a way.
They were the only two hentai games featured on HOTU (Home of the Underdogs) and later spread to other abandonware sites (posted along with oldwarez).
I fully grant that they are straightforward and stories they tell are boring. But I see elements from them in a lot of more recent dating sims/adult visual novels.
And you should expect games released 26/28 years after them to be significantly better in all regards. Better graphics, yes, but also a complex and involving story, improved mechanics of the game, choices that actually matter, build-up to events rather than existing preset events, better sound and music, all of that.
However, a lot of recent games only feature better graphics. Stories are bland and repetitive, leading up to sex through meaningless choices (all ending up at the same conclusion), no game to speak of and scripted events that don't trigger because of bugs caused by laziness. All without any sound or music.
Sure there are exceptions. But even then, there are games which have 10,000 lines of text, two thousand of which are conversations and narration and eight thousand are descriptions of sex scenes. And there are 1000 images, but all non-sexual interactions are handled by the same repeating 20 images and the rest are sex scenes from every possible angle or frames of animation.
It feels like we have taken a step back. And people accept and cherish that!
This game is a perfect example of what those people are looking for. There's a long lead-in, the story is slow burn and there are people who complain that they want sex scenes already, based only on the renderings they've seen so far.
There's an involving story which we can expect will lead to sex. But sex is going to be icing on the cake and there will be an actual cake. A lot of games are just icing without any substance. Just sugar that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
(The gripe I have with patron-funded games is that they spend a long time in development and end up costing way more than what a commercial game would cost.)