takeover feedback

So, I've done it. I've read the entire synopsis. And I'm really sorry for what I'm about to inflict upon you and Pen. Please keep in mind that this is a) only my personal opinion and b) that I have no context of previous happening save for the setup for the Mina route.
That said, let's get right to it: This is not good. At all.

I shall explain why by going through this synopsis top to bottom, day-by-day, and commenting along the way.

Day 4
- Why is the puppet so evil?
- What's his motivation and what made him be this way?
- Where does the "you humans" remark come from? Isn't the puppet John's original body compelled to act like him with a spell? Where's the non-human part in that?
- Why is the puppet so powerful? He can materialize money with pretty much no effort, apparently without having to even cast a spell. How is it possible that he learned that all from the spellbook and got this good at it, especially considering that it's only been 4 days, as he himself states?
- What exactly is the puppet's plan? *Why* is that his plan? Where did that motivation come from? Why does he want to achieve it?
- Why the hell can the puppet exhibit Thanos-levels of power on random couples in the street, not even in close proximity, without doing anything like casting spells or the like (at least as far as is explicitly stated)?
- When the fuck did he learn to teleport, and not just himself but multiple people at the same time at the drop of a hat? How did he even know where to teleport?!
- WHY THE HELL IS HE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY?!

Day 288
- Isn't the magic thing blood-related? Why can Jaina use magic all of a sudden?
    - If the answer is "because the puppet gave her this power" please miss me with that shit
- Why is there no exposure whatsoever of the actual plans of the puppet. The businessman would've been a perfect opening for some more explanation of what the actual shit is actually happening here. Instead it's just a bland filler that does nothing to drive the plot forward.
- Why can Jaina "sense magic"? What is that even supposed to mean?
- "Make sure nothing arouses you more than being in a harem." This is the laziest excuse for a harem ending I've ever seen. You can't just build that into the story with no reason! Tjis sounds like a really bad insert of the authors own wishes with nothing to back it up.
- "{spell}Advocabit Finalem.{/spell}" Naturally it is not even explained what that spell is supposed to do. Are we just supposed to assume it's something semi-evil-and-mind-controlling?
- "The player is now given three choices of ending: Kiyoshi, Kyoko, and Yui." Excuse me, what the fuck? There was no mention of any of them up to this point. Where did this come from? I have absolutely no context for this and it seems like a rather arbitrary "choose your fap material" kind of choice.

Day 330:
- New lined characters introduced in this segment, in order: Rika (not shrine Rika). No, just no. Never introduce a character with the same name as an existing character, ESPECIALLY if it's a one off while the actual original one has more uses.
- "We start with a perspective shift to Kiyo, who is our new narrator." We've never done this before. Is this consistent with ST style-rules? Personally, I don't think so. The entire point of this VN and the characterization and narratvive style we have chosen for John is aimed at making the player assume him as the protagonist and making choices *through him*. Ripping us out of this and shoving the player into another character all of a sudden which they have never controlled before destroys the entire concept of what the rest of the game wants to achieve. Besides that it deprsonalizes the choices we as the player make because apparently "eh, we'll just switch to another character anyway".
- Why is Micky necessary? Or Jesse? We're obviously still in the same class that Kiyoshi is in. Why do we need two new characters? Why don't we use the existing ones to better drive home to point of everything having changed? These are just a random characters nobody cares about.
- "even if it's a friend you want to "jump the bones of AS THEY GREW UP."" Are you actually saying that Kiyoshi in this situation lusts for underage sex with John? Kinda seems contrary to our company line.
- "as Kiyo narrates for us that Master's libido, they all know, is effectively unending, as it must be "to allow the mothers to serve him." What is this StarCraft Zerg Rush?
- "Rika does so with her mouth, which Kiyo assures us will make Elizabeth "furious."" Okay. Why? This tells us absolutely nothing about why this would be the case, which would have been an opportunity to somewhat explain this new world we apparently now live in.
- Okay, we're apparently almost a year into the route and I still have no fucking idea what the puppet's actual goal is, save for reproduction.
- "Class President Chistina" Where did she come from all of a sudden. You namedrop her like she's supposed to mean something, but in actuality she's just another useless blank slate that increases the cognitive overhead for the reader.
- "The puppet then takes Rika, lifts her to the newly-vacated table, and begins having sex with her as a flustered Elizabeth tells the girls that this is a demonstration of lovemaking to prepare them for the real thing." So actually sticking your dick into a vagina is not the "real thing"? What?
- "Laura compliments the girls on their performance with Master this morning" She wasn't even in the room when it happened. Now we have to use mental gymnastics to find a reason that this can be the case, i.e. "apparently someone who was actually there told her that they did a good job", which seems a bit stilted to me.
- By the way, what the hell are all these classes? What are they supposed to accomplish. Up to this point you've simply thrown random shit at me without any actual explanation.
- "Kiyo corrects to "My lips are yours, Master! I'm a greedy girl, so I'll be drinking everything, okay?" which makes her feel warm and fuzzy." Honestly, to me this sounds like the fever-dream of a 16-year-old acne-ridden teenager in the middle of his first climax.
- "The rest of class goes like a breeze, and Kiyo receives a 100 for the day." Apparently we changed the entire evaluation system as well, good to know. Just make it even more complicated to keep up, sure thing.
- "Kiyo decides to hide her true self from Jaina and begins speaking in her old way again." ????? What is "her old way?" It was never mentioned anywhere that anything happened to her (besides being genderbent, apparently, and even that's only implied). If I didn't know Kiyo was fem-Kiyoshi, I would never guess that this is the case here.
- "The puppet tells Elizabeth that he won't take away her job as a teacher, but to know her most valuable quality is nothing more than her lips." Nothing better than some good, ol' misogyny thrown into what is now part of the Student Transfer universe.
- Okay, so apparently the puppet has sex with every single female person in the entire universe? And he GB'd some of the men as well, so where does he actually find the time to do anything at all other than get his knob polished 24/7? If you say "he can bend time" I actually wouldn't be surprised at this point.

Epilogue 1:
- We are now in fantasy-technobabble land for some reason. Sure thing, let's just remove the entirety of the Student Transfer universe and substitute our own where we can do away with all those pesky plot limitations we'd otherwise have to deal with!
- Yet more character introductions that mean nothing to the reader and they won't care about in the slightest.
- A note about naming: Avoide characters with similar names, especially if they have a chance of appearing in the same scenes. It's confusing and makes it even harder for the reader to keep them apart, especially if they're new. Besides that, they may inadvertently ascribe traits of the original to the new one as they might appear too similar upon first introduction.
- Kiyo catgirl: This one hell of a lazy setup just to shoehorn in the catgirl CG. I do not approve.
- By the way, how old is Kyon supposed to be? Apparently he has never cum before, so this is raising several red flags for me.
- Something is apparently very wrong but nobody cares and then the story just ends. We're not getting a sequel, so why is there a cliffhanger? This just makes it feel unfulfilling.

Day 600 (maybe Epilogue 2, though it's not named that way):
- Kyoko apparently nows that shit has hit the fan. Why is she not leaving? There is obviously nothing for her at this place anymore and the obvious solution is to *just go away*
- All the males are gone for no reason. It is never explained why.
- Wait a minute, just a few parapgraphs beforehand Kyoko was seemingly unaffacted, and now she's dreaming of having the puppet's child? This makes absolutely no sense.
- "We timeskip, and Elizabeth is now a new teacher at the school. She teaches maid classes, obviously," No, this is not obvious.
- "She then worries that she's crossed a red line and her free will is forfeit, before having the terrible thought that maybe she'd be better off hypnotized and happy." That's just not Kyoko's characterization.
- The puppet apparently likes doing mass-hypnosis/mind-change stuff. Why has Kyoko never been affected, given that he also does it in classes she is in?
- "As the sex scene goes on, Kyoko accidentally calls out "John" upon having her nipples pinched, before immediately panicing and realizing that everyone else has been programmed to call him Master." How did she survive 2 YEARS and now slips up on something this simple. That just reeks of lazy writing and forced plot convenience.
- I'm sorry, but I'm just completely lost on the rest of this epilogue. I do not get it at all, so I'll skip straight to the next one.

Actually Epilogue 2 (what's the one before this then if not an epilogue?):
- Yet another batch of useless character introductions, we know the drill by now. STOP MAKING UP NEW CHARACTER FOR EVERY ENDING! At least reuse the existing ones from another ending.
- Apparently "Joy" is now the narrator, which is great because nobody knows who she is, nobody cares what she does and in general it's a completely blank and uninspiring slate we're forced into.
- Okay, Attack-on-Titan-style movement is now a thing, with ever-elusive-and-never-explained-magic no less. Consider me annoyed.
- Ah yes, six black-robed men appear and an epic action sequence occurs. Honestly, this sounds like it was written by a 15 year-old who was brought up on the worse 50% of every superhero action movie ever.
- Okay, and now we're apparently somewhere where people swear on their father's blade even though they have GUNS and somehow demons are involved. Fantasy or Sci-Fi, which is it?! If you want to write Fairy Tail fanfiction, do it somewhere else.
- Of course! "Level-five amplification", how could I not have thought of that!
- "Alice instead takes Joy's hand and pulls her back, saying he's dangerous." No shit, sherlock. The guy just swore on an old piece of steel that he'd kill you.
- By the way, why does somebody have to "taste my steel" if it was previously mentioned that the objects they were holding are gun-shaped? Is it a gun-shaped dagger or a dagger-shaped gun? Neither of these sound particularly useful to me in the current situation.
- Okay, we've shed all semblance of anything that could even tangentially be related to what the actual game contains up to v4 and are now living 100% in fairy-dust land.
- John/Puppet is now King. So he mind-controlled the entire country at the very least and for some reason decided to take it back to monarchy? Whatever.
- Okay, he's living in a castle. If we can't time travel we'll at least usher in the golden middle ages again! Because you know, that worked so well the last time around.
- "Joy says "oh well" and the girls head off to school. The End". Oh, so you're going to entirely ignore the situation with the guys wanting to kill you at this very moment. Sure thing, I'll just go to school, they won't follow me there! And while we're at it, let's just end the story there for good measure.

Epilogue 3:
- 13 new characters.
- We're not actually Yui at all, despite it being called Yui's ending. This is promising.
- Wait, Micky was in Kio's class as well. And Yui is similar in age to Kiyoshi. So why is Micky also in the class of Yui's kid? That is not possible.
- WHY ARE THEY SWORD-FIGHTING?! It's 2018!
- "The garden is on mess and a tree is on fire, so Penelope casts a water spell to put it out." If this is an attempt at situational humor, it's failed.
- "She raises one hand and casts a single spell, fixing the chaos left of the garden" Unlimited power for no reason. I don't think I have to elaorate on why this sucks.
- "Every person present shows blatant confusion at this statement" This is probably the most true meta-statement in this entire story.
- "...and that so long as Alexander is not stronger than Circe, he'll need their support." Where did Circe come from? She was never mentioned in any of the lead-up.
- I think this is some kind of attempt at giving a reason for all the stuff that came before, but I honestly don't get it at all. It makes no sense to me. This is too little, too late. No foreshadowing, not enough exposure to themes that might make this even semi-relevant to whatever the story was before.
- "They have their world view shaken." Two sentences later: "They leave for class, and Prez looks back to Alexander. The End." Nicely done. "Everything I thought I knew was a lie, guess I better just go to class. (insert shrugging emoji)"

General thoughts:
- The entire characterization of the entire cast goes out of the window. As far as I'm concerned this is a different game. Since everyone is mind controlled, no lesson we could possibly learn here is worth a single drop of shit in the end.
- And big surprise, we don't actually learn any lessons. The most we get is some half-assed explanation, if anything at all. Kiyoshi's and Kyokos ending are basically the same, they provide some exposure on the classes they take and end with them succumbing to whatever weird mind-control shit is going on, the end.
- If Kiyoshi mind-controlling the entire school in a day is bad, this is DEFCON 0.
- 2 of the 4(?) endings somewhow veer off into some weird scifi-and-simultaneously-low-fantasy world which makes no sense at all and frankly is so far removed from anything the actual game deals with that they should be scrapped in their entirety

If I didn't know better, I'd say this thing was written by a teenager who really likes fantasy (anime), George. R. R. Martin and Machiavelli and has thus decided to write some kind of power-fantasy, self-insert fan fiction to quench their desires for smut in such a hybridized setting without actually being that good at it.

I appreciate the effort that has gone into this and I know a lot of time was poured into the Takeover as a whole, but to me this is some of the worst grammatically correct and properly animated stuff I've ever read.

When I first joined the dev-team, in the very beginning, I remember you asked me to take a look at Takeover in its then-current form. I dinstinctly remember that even back then, I was confused as to even the basic premise of the route: Why was the puppet suddenly so evil? Why did things escalate so quickly? What was up with Jaina's fearful reaction at the meeting in the cafe, even though nothing had yet happened and no foreshadowing had told us or Jaina about the evil-ness of the puppet?
At the time I thought I was simply too dumb to understand what you were producing and I didn't want to rain on anyone's parade since I was new, so I just dropped out of the takeover thing quietly, save for doing some animation duties on what existed at that point. It is now, several years later, that I realize that I was in fact not as dumb as I might have initially believed (though maybe still a bit, judgement's still out on that one) and that my initial confusion with this plot has carried over into the entirety of the rest of the route.

I can only apologize for these harsh words, but I do not know how to else express my concerns in a manner as succinct as this (if you can still call this "succinct").
I also admit that since I haven't been involved in Takeover for years I'm missing a lot of context, but that also serves one of my points: Someone who goes into this fresh, with no previous exposure, will apparently become majorly confused, which is a sign that the story might have to be re-thought.

I know that a lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into the making of this story and please believe me when I say that I appreciate that *a lot*. But as it stands, in this current iteration, this is a hard pass from me.