As ever, thanks for taking as much time as you did to explore the game and articulate your thoughts. I think at this point you've written more words in your essays about the genre than I've actually found the time to, and it's been a genuine pleasure to see you get to know the genre and come at it from a very different perspective to mine at times, and a very vital one at that. π
But yeah, I totally feel you on those issues, as they all tend to be things I wasn't so fond of in my own time, either. The probing character customization conversations in particular always left a bad taste in my mouth. Whenever the girls asked me what I thought, I always said that I liked it because, yeah, even if they're not real people of course, I didn't like intervening in their autonomy. If they like it and I like them as people, who am I to judge? And yeah, the touch screen kissing... I could do without. They went on to refine their approach for stuff like that in the 3DS games and it's interesting to consider the lineage of those touch screen features given the series' shared leadership with Tokimemo Girls Side, but it was never what I came to those games for by any means.
All told, you did great as always and I genuinely enjoyed reading this! Congrats on graduating your Konami dating sim history course! πππ