It's already pretty obvious you could care less if I actually have to explain the difference there to you in that fairly bad analogy attempt. So i'll just save us both the time and argument.
*Shrug* I mean, it's pretty obvious it's not a story first game, as evidenced from the lack of general plot direction, so it's a bit weird to demand character integrity from it. If anything, this game goes out of it's way to avoid meaningfully progressing "romances" with 90% of it's main "love interests".
Frankly it seems like you're just bitching for the sake of bitching. Tropes exist and just because something is tropey doesn't mean it's bad.
There was no analogy in my post, and I was actually interested how you can reconcile "chasing" something that you already know is within your reach by design. It seems like a logical impossibility at worst and self deception at best.
As for the tone I do think it suffers from the game being unable to decide whether it's a serious story or a goofy comedy and it doesn't stick the landing in either area because of it, but I wouldn't call it bad. It's definitely a cut above 95% of slop that passes for games here.
I also find it tremendously ironic that you use the word "gameplay" when describing this type of media.