The Absolute State of Modern NTR: An essay (I didn't really set out to make it one, but I just like to write on and on and ramble, so it ended up as one)
I hate this modern deluge of NTR games because most of them have cheap, weightless, and weak NTR. There are far, far too many "NTR" games with what I like to call "The Wilson Boyfriend" named after the volleyball from the movie "Cast Away". Basically, the Wilson Boyfriend is a boyfriend that doesn't really fill a boyfriend role at all, but is there to make the game "NTR". He's just there, and there's a little plaque reading "Boyfriend" stapled onto his chest, so that the girl who's going around getting fucked by everyone and their horse, dog, cow, and mother technically has a "boyfriend", so it's technically NTR. It's weightless, pitiful "NTR" that doesn't seem like such at all. It's more like it's simply called or declared to be "NTR", without really hitting enough notes to actually be considered NTR, like a big sticker slapped on a TV calling it a toaster; if you look under the surface and put away the notion that the game is NTR, you can actually just imagine that the NTR isn't there, it doesn't modify the story enough or have a big enough presence at all. To make it clear how bad that is, imagine if you had an FPS game where you could just imagine out all the shooting. I don't mean imagine that there's no guns or anything, there's FPS games with like, magic and such, like Heretic, I mean imagine a first-person shooter game where the shooting is so inconsequential that you can just imagine that it's not there.You might think this would make me happy about it, as I can just imagine the NTR that I dislike away, but I hate it way more than I hate proper NTR. That's because this brand of NTR is so weightless and easy to artificially insert that it's way too prevalent! It's low-quality NTR for those that like NTR, and it's NTR staining a game that we would otherwise enjoy for those of us that don't like NTR! It doesn't satisfy anybody! Unless they're an NTR lover with no sense of taste or quality, I guess.
But what is good quality NTR? As someone who isn't an NTR fan, I'm not exactly the best judge on this matter, but let me give my two cents, as I've given a good effort at walking a mile in a NTR fan's shoes. Good NTR is NTR that has weight to it, plain and simple. There's the sense of a relationship actually being there, instead of the sense that the boyfriend barely exists and is just a volleyball in the background. I don't mean that he has to be super involved, I've seen NTR that had weight to it where the boyfriend didn't actually do much at all, but the relationship between him and the girl should be enough of a thing to the point that it feels like NTR. The bulk of this modern NTR wave is just weightless NTR. I can't really say in definite terms what kind of NTR has weight and what kind doesn't, as it's really much more of a feeling than anything else, but if I can remove the NTR and the scene plays out almost exactly the same, then I usually find that NTR weightless.
For example, imagine your typical magical girl corruption type of story; there's a magical girl, she fights bad guys, she comes up against a bad guy with hypnosis powers or whatever, and she slowly gets corrupted. Now take that same situation, and add a boyfriend into the mix, which makes it NTR corruption. There's two ways of handling that scenario, a way that has weight, and a way that doesn't have weight. I think the way to have that scenario with weight is to have it be a consistent thing, and to have the boyfriend act like an actual boyfriend. She actively has to hide all the sex she's having from her boyfriend, she flakes on dates with her boyfriend to have sex, she tries to have sex with him but is massively disappointed, so she sneaks off to have sex with other men, and meanwhile the boyfriend tries to win back her favor time and time again, but she's too distracted by sex with other men for any of it to count. Basically, be a good writer. The weightless way to do this is to have the boyfriend just be there, and for him to not feel like a boyfriend at all. Introduce the boyfriend at the start, and then have no scenes where he's really there and the two characters seem like a real couple. Even if he's constantly observing the NTR, scenes where he's there as the act is happening, it can come across as weightless if he's not actively part of that scene, if he's just a Christmas tree decoration, if he's just a volleyball with a face on it. A lot of the time, weightless NTR is like an ex-boyfriend watching his ex-girlfriend getting railed, there's no sense of a present relationship.
Now, in closing, I want to illustrate a point, I'm not sure how to introduce it, so I'll just spit it out. NTR is short for netorare, which translates to something like "sleep stealing". This phrase usually refers to a woman falling out of love with her man due to cheating on him with another man who was better at sex. The woman gets "stolen" from her partner by a man who was better at sex with her than he was; she gets stolen from her partner by sleeping with another man, hence "sleep stealing" hence netorare, hence NTR. In the case of weightless NTR, it doesn't feel like anything is getting stolen, it just feels like a slutty girl has an imaginary schizophrenic hallucination of a boyfriend.
Summary: I dislike NTR, but more than that I hate the modern deluge of NTR cause most of it is garbage by NTR standards. The market right now is flooded with shitty NTR that's added in as an afterthought, and it sucks. I'm tired of games that follow a slutty girl that has a "boyfriend" that could be edited out of the game entirely with a few dialogue changes; I wish it was just a game about that slutty girl, and I'm sure that NTR fans don't like such slapdash, low-quality NTR, assuming they have a discerning enough taste to even tell.
