I totally disagree. The 2 stories are so deeply integrated that if you remove one, the other falls apart completely. It's therefore 1 story, and so far the story line is the least problem with this game IMHO.
Please expand on how boss and mother story lines currently play into the VR in-game.
Even sister story line is out there for the purpose of incest / SAO-like feel. If you do want you could even drop GF and integrate GF and sister story lines into one, keeping the story progression and feel of both but streamlining development.
Or combine GF's friends and sister into one character, you keep the ntr while maintaining everything there is.
Yes, everyone likes branching and deep stories, but no one can deny these multiple stories and characters all require development time and resources. At some point you gotta make amends with that you don't require 20 characters and plots to make an interesting story. Expedition 33 has less characters than this game.
Less is more in most instances. Do we really need the friend in work/boss plot line? Do we need the father? Sure, again, rich plots are great, but lets not fool ourselves; most developers try these grands visions they want to bring to life but soon realize is simply not feasible. And at that point cutting them out and fixing the plots to make sense would take even greater time and at that point many simply drop the projects.
We've seen this even with great names in the AAA industry when they try to go independent.
Yes, no doubt developer here has plans into bringing all these many characters into the VR game plot at some point, but is it worthy? And more importantly, is it doable? Specially if going with branching options. The more characters the more branching plot lines you got and the more complex it gets to keep things tight and coherent. We still don't have Winds of Winter because George RR Martin can't make sense to bring his many plot lines into one.
I haven't tried the game you mention, but in Eternum there's no branching. Is a linear story plot where everything clearly goes toward the same goal from the start; chad gets harem, all girls want MC's dick. Easy plot line to write.
This isn't like that. Here developer is hinting at chad, sharing, ntr and loyal lines for male MC side; and there's also the branching for female version. Then there's branching for black guy, for GF, for mother, for boss, for sister.
Anyone who thinks for even a second that many branching lines with that many characters is feasible is fooling themselves and will be highly disappointed when developer starts cutting them off, with the alternative being dropping the whole thing altogether out of burnout.
I like this game, only reason I even bother writing this, but I do feel this will be abandoned in less than a year or it will be take a whole year between updates simply because how complex to keep story lines connected will be.