I guess I chose a good time to jump in. Just discovered the game a few days ago and saw that a new demo just released which was nice.

Really enjoyed the characters. I expected albie to just feel like a "side" character, and he is, but he's got a surprising amount of depth to him too. I love grace's snarky passive aggressiveness. Stuart is cool, there's less to say about him but that's fine honestly. he's like, Normal in a game where everyone's quirky in some way or another.

As for the main three: they are all so likable, god.  It's interesting that Syd likes Steph, and i found myself thinking "do i want to make choices as to who I would want to end up with? Or for what Syd wants?". It's interesting because Syd and Maisy obviously (to me at least) had the best synergy! But then Syd is super in love with Steph...or IS he? Maybe he just enjoys her looks? They've barely talked until the events of the game, you know—how do we know they're really a good fit for each other?  And am I really gonna ignore Jayda? She likes Syd! If I try to "play matchmaker" for Syd by setting him up with Steph, I'm just letting down Jayda aren't I? She's not the MC, but isn't she as much of a character as Syd is??? Aaah!!

In the end, I just tried by best to spend equal amounts of time with each of them. I knew there'd be a tradeoff (less deep friendships for each), but I just never liked the idea of leaving any of them hanging for too long. Doing it like this could give Syd the most amount of options....hopefully.

Other miscellaneous thoughts I had while playing included "I could hang out with Steph the most, but she might think I'm trying too hard".

"I could hang out with Maisy the most but there's a similar problem, especially since Nacho exists. Don't want Maisy to think Syd's in love, or for Syd to fall in love while Maisy's in a relationship—both could be bad"

"I could hang out with Jayda the most, but what if she becomes too dependent on Syd? She always immediately replies to the texts when he texts her? hmm..."

"It's really hard to know which choice is the best here???" (there usually wasn't a best choice, which is good!)

"Uh oh, Steph's hyping up the second book...I bet Syd's not gonna like it and i'm gonna have to choose between lying or not (didn't progress w/her enough to find out if this was true)"

"Otherworld is interesting but if there's that many seasons, I dunno if i'll finish it. Is it worth? Maybe I'll just focus on the book, since Maisy seems to already have a lot of things to talk about"

Other stuff:

• For some reason the joke that got me the most was "protestants vs catholics sounds like a fighting game"

• I guess i have a question; At times where you can choose a character to hang out with, but they brush you off like "oh, sorry but I'm busy today". Does that still improve Syd's relationship with them a tiny bit? Like, you at least thought to ask them?

• The ending survey: I thought it was pretty accurate. Was a little sad that I couldn't connect more with Steph, but that's also just the choice I made.

For these next three, they're definitely easier said than done, but here are some things i think could've been improved:

• I do think it'd be a nice if there were some more backgrounds, or like, alternate angles of the places we know. But that could also be hard to do if the current backgrounds are stock photos. Like "stock photo of house interior" works on its own, but then it'd be hard to show any alternate angles unless they're included in the same stock photo...set? (idk how stock photos work). 

• Of course all of the lines can't be voiced (logistics w/the voice actors and all). But it'd be cool if there were short, generic voicelines a la FE Awakening. Like If Jayda's happy on a line of dialogue she could say "Yippee!". I felt like I forgot some of the characters voices sometimes, which isn't the end of the world, but still.

It could get annoying for some people cuz there's a lot of text in the story, so it'd probably have to be less frequent than what you'd hear in a FE support conversation. And there could always be an on/off option for it in the settings.

• And then, I think it'd be cool if there was art of Syd relaxing on his bed watching TV, & Syd lying on his bed with a book, to spice up those two events. The presentation on those felt a bit lacking, since it was the same bedroom.jpg the whole time, and you end up doing these events pretty frequently.

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• Maybe it's just me but I made a TON of saves. Due to the nature of the game, I kept sorta peeking at options to see a few lines of dialogue, then resetting to see the other option. I exhausted, let's see...13 pages of saves!...yeah lol. I was a bit confused by the page count since it doesn't go past 9—it'd be nice if the left and right keys scrolled the numbers shown at the bottom.

• There is...a huge amount of content in this game, it seems. Wait, the steam page says 2023? Can it really be completed by then if only 2 of the weeks are done so far?? I guess a lot of the systems are in place by now though.

It's gonna be so interesting replaying this game. I'm a bit tired right now cuz I just binged it and wrote a long ass comment, but i'll probably go back and try gearing my options toward each of the heroines and seeing how it plays out.

Anyways, yeah. Long comment, so don't feel pressured to respond to it all. Looking forward to the next release!