I am of two minds when I think of this game. With one, I am one who gets no bitches so to speak, I enjoy games with romance in them, which is why I'm partially such a sucker for persona games, that and they're also really really good games. This game offers a similar thing as the persona games, for one with no bitches like myself, which is the chance to talk to women, or rather talk suggestively? Or as if you're trying to become more then friends, and choose waifus.

But I am also one impatient motherfucker or rather I don't like wasting my time, which is why having the entire dungeon section basically just be a waste of time is infuriating, this game is like, all grind no sigma. Iirc the second game has a choice for difficulty which allows the player to gain more exp while also making combat less difficult, honestly if I could customise it like persona 4 golden on steam, then that'd be pretty much perfect as I don't wish to trivialize combat, just grinding.

So far I've enjoyed talking with the characters and getting to know them as I hang out with them, even if some are just unbelievably annoying (like Mahiru) but it's still nice having such a diverse cast of characters, it's just a shame that the dungeon crawling is easily the most boring part of this game.

At first glance, the idea of having to effectively breed your party members with this being a main mechanic of the game makes it look like this game is going to be a grind, especially once you realize that your starting children are gonna have shit level caps and you're gonna need to keep breeding as your bonds deepen with the game's 13 maidens to get more capable children. Instead, the grind comes in from how horrifically repetitive and easy the game is.

The general gameplay loop of this game sees you talking to the 13 maidens and breeding children with them by day and going dungeon crawling by night to fight off bosses and make your children stronger. Thing is the dungeon crawling in question is an incredible slog due to the game's absurdly easy difficulty that lets you basically auto-battle at all times with no risk and the randomly generated dungeons with such a simplistic layout of square rooms where the action happens and connecting hallways with nothing to do but walk that every single floor of every dungeon feels damn near the same. Combine this with how much exploring you're expected to do between general progression, quest grinding, and even the occasional bout of actual grinding (mercifully useless after one or two dungeons due to the shit difficulty curve) and you end up with one half of the gameplay loop being absolute garbage, which is especially damning when said half is more like 80-90% of the game.

This is compounded by the battle system itself since while it has some interesting ideas, they end up completely squandered between the aforementioned ability to auto damn near every battle with shocking competency and how broken the game's Chain Gauge system is to the point that it dominates over any other strategy for the entire game on the occasions where you do have to fight manually. This is made even worse by the moves which are meant to explicitly raise said gauge by dramatic amounts, meaning every proper fight in the game is solved the same way regardless of anything.

As for the story itself, the game is at least well enough aware that you're likely here for the dating sim aspects rather than an actual plot and more or less just gives you an excuse plot that does little more than contextualize why you're doing what you're doing. It's more or less fine for what it is, if a little long-winded, with the exception of Mana, a raccoon-looking fairy who mainly exists to neg on you and the maidens and would frankly be better served as an ingredient in a stew.

As for the maidens themselves, I'll admit to only reading through some of the maidens' stories, specifically Tarua (she is best girl, she goes awawa), Mahiru, Ruka, Collette, Yuzuha, Alfie, and the back half of Reone's story. Overall, they were mostly light-hearted fluff, though a couple had some slight dramatic moments sprinkled in (I can't remember if I necessarily cried towards the end of Yuzuha's story, but it was probably my favorite of what I read). Nothing groundbreaking in any of what I read, but it's all fine enough and if you're in the audience for such a thing, it's probably the one aspect of the game that's actually acceptable.

The actual delivery method of said stories is... questionable. Basically, each maiden has an intimacy meter with five gauges, one of which is unlocked at the start and the other four of which unlock upon clearing one of the three dungeons in each season (one for Spring, one for Summer, etc). In addition, filling up each gauge to move to the next one requires reading through the two mandatory events unlocked by each gauge segment as well as whatever extra events need to be read to fill up the current segment so you can initiate a classmating ritual to access the next gauge. As all intimacy gauges unlock at once, this means that for optimal results (namely getting every maiden's gauge to its current maximum in preparation for the next unlock), you'll be reading through a whopping 26 events minimum between dungeon clears, which ends up being a massive slog. While it is technically possible to put off some girls until later to mitigate this, this instead led to me, in the heat of the moment, only reading whatever immediately grabbed me and just skipping through the rest to get it over with. Admittedly, I doubt I missed much given the general content of the stories.

Overall, you're pretty much here for the cute girls, but it's hard to ignore how fucking tedious the gameplay in between is and it really drags down the game overall. Add in that nothing here is really all that noteworthy and there are far better ways you could get what you're looking for unless for some reason, you really want to have shitty and repetitive dungeon crawling in your dating sim experience. Either that or the premise of the RPG where you have pretend sex to make warriors to save the world piqued your curiosity that much.