my whole impression of it was based on half-remembered blog posts from 20 years ago, when everyone was treating it like some haha cRaZy JaPaN ecchi game. But it's just... not that?
It's an EXTREMELY tightly scoped arcade volleyball game, with almost nothing else going on. Also it's a very fun arcade volleyball game!
There's zero writing, the "campaign" is about three hours of increasingly-difficult volleyball matches, and then the island explodes and you start over with all your stuff from the previous run lol (I thought it was a multiple-endings thing, but no, the end of the game is just "the island explodes" lmao. The anime girls escape unharmed)
The core loop is just play volleyball -> win money -> use money to buy gifts -> give gifts to your teammate to make her better at winning volleyball -> use leftover money to buy cute outfits
This rules? It's a perfect allocation of dev resources for what was clearly a very limited budget. Polish a core gameplay loop, on a scale of like five minutes, and then make several hundred swimsuits to buy as your long-term retention system. No upgrade trees, no branching narrative, no hidden collectibles, just Play Volleyball -> Buy Costumes
Getting to Wear Cute Outfits is like 70% of the reason anyone plays videogames in the first place. It's perfect
also it's like... not even particularly horny? I mean yeah there's girls in swimsuits but like, that happens in real life. There's some boob physics, sometimes, when the physics code happens to work. It's not like a totally NON horny game obviously, but it's nowhere close to even basic ecchi stuff. like it's tamer than xenoblade lmao
iirc the whole reason the game even exists is because some programmer on Itagaki's team spent all their free time screwing around with water physics, and Itagaki himself was majorly into gambling/information theory and wanted an excuse to make a casino game, so they worked backwards to come up with a project that'd let them fixate on their hobbies for x months
This explains a lot about the trajectory of later games and Venus Vacation lmao