This game is an absolute mess. Let's start with some of my main critiques:
- Way too ambitious -- there are a lot of characters, but the amount of things you can do are limited to a small handful of them. If there was an idiom to summarize this, it'd be "as wide as an ocean, with the depth of a puddle". As a result of introducing so many different characters and relationships into the story it seems the story development crawls by at a snail-like pace.
- On-rails "sandbox". Because of the previously mentioned point, the game ends at a preset day, and there is no sandbox. You don't explore and choose which girl you want to progress with first, you're shoehorned into specific events based on what the developer wants. You always start the intro with the train sequence, you then segue into meeting your sister, then going to the park, going home, going to the aunt's house, going to the beach, then going home, then going to the office. There's variations within those events that change who you interact with, but those events are fixed, you have no control over the overall day's events.
- Lack of in-game direction. One event that frequently gets many players stuck (including myself!) is the beach event, where it's not clear exactly what to do and what the goal is. There's a lot of different scenes that can play out based on different factors, you can kiss your sister based on your relationship with her, you can fondle her in the shower if she's drunk enough, but you don't really know of this unless you're constantly rolling back your save over and over to try out different outcomes. Sometimes the game seemingly stops, giving you no way out of the beach event until you click something random and hope it progresses to the end of the day.
- Convoluted relationship system. It almost seems simple enough, but the in-game help menu that describes what each stat does is exceedingly vague (especially since a lot of content isnt even developed much). For instance there's a liked stat (yellow thumbs up), a red heart stat (love) and a corruption stat that doesn't show up on the main screen, and a devil stat, but all of them don't seemingly do anything other than serve as stat checks for conversation options. The in-game reasoning for how the stats differentiate themselves doens't reflect the dialogue options you unlock as a result of raising said stats. Why do some characters start at 0 relationship level, and why do you start the game at a very negative relationship level with your sister despite how much she seemingly cares for you at the start?