Out of all the weird character design changes, especially with Shun and aging him for what... US sensibilities? Why doesn't Kouya wink! That's his trademark. Also it's weird that you still kept was Kyouji's eyes closed, which I always hated that he never opens his eyes... makes it hard to connect with him. Also Kouya's face needs some work. The improvements of the characters I like are Kounosuke, Shin, and Soutarou. But yes they're all supposed to be high school students like the protagonist so making Shun 18 when he's supposed to be the youngest makes zero sense... also isn't Hiroyuki (you) supposed to be human? I always thought it was a self-insert.
Viewing post in Homecoming ~Morenatsu Revisited~ comments
Nota lot of people liked Shun being 16 also with maybe future content do you really wanna see Shun naked if he was 16? In the game Shun said he turned 18 a month ago so he technically is still the youngest. I do agree with you on Kouya though, He needs a little work on his design but that can wait until the story is finishes, I would like to have the story finished then them takeing the time to fix Kouya.
Regarding the character designs, we have stated on multiple occasions that these are subject to change. In addition, the reason Kouya doesn't wink is because we haven't provided that image yet. As far as the code goes, Kouya does have calls for a winking sprite, but for the moment, the image it uses is just his smiling sprite. Again, this is just temporary until we get additional sprite work done.
With Kyouji, we decided we wanted to keep his eyes similar to the original for one main reason. In Japan, "fox eyes" is a common trope used to identify when a character is very wise and reliable. Both of these are intrinsic qualities for Kyouji, and so, it was deemed appropriate to keep them like that.
The aging up of characters was done for one major reason: legality. While the national age of consent in Japan is 13, all prefectures have overridden this with their own age, most of which are around 17-18. While the original team could have gotten away with having sexual interaction with a 16 year old (who acts like an 8 year old), we won't. Not to mention, Soutarou was originally the youngest at 15, so yeah...there's that too. Now, Shun is the youngest of the group, even if he is 18, because he was the last to have his 18th birthday.
Finally, Hiroyuki: Originally, he was a self-insert, but therein lies the problem. Self-inserts are notoriously difficult to write for, especially for consistency purposes. The original game, as much as all of us in Stormsinger Studios enjoyed it, suffers from an extreme level of inconsistencies, especially where Hiroyuki is concerned. To remedy this, it was felt that making him have a specific personality and removing the self-insert aspects would be best. We have mentioned multiple times in the past about why we removed humans entirely. You can see this in the FAQ (which does admittedly need updating a bit).