I really dislike about your comments that you postulate your personal feelings as some kind of eternal truth.
They are not.
Please say "I think the routes should not exist." This makes a huge difference imho and let other people think you want to add a valuable argument to the discussion instead of being some dude that got too attached to a porn VN and is now shouting at the moon.
Cheers mate.
It's clear that my comment is just my personal opinion. It's my own comment after all, it can't be anything other than my opinion. Adding 'I think' won't change the content of my message in any way.
And I'm not looking into forcing it in other people and I don't want anyone to take my opinion as some sort of 'universal truth'. I just really disliked what the routes did to the game progression.
But I believie I was too agressive in my comment, so I will actually give you that. I went too far into the agression and I'm sorry for such.
But my opinion on the routes don't really change, I truly believe the game would be better without them. I wouldn't change anything regarding the content of the game (maybe only the result of Evellyn's date), the game is amazing and the content is also amazing, no matter which type.
It's just that I feel that us, as players, should have freedom of choice when it came to what we want Ashe to be. Fragmenting her persona in three and forcing us to choose one so early in the game don't sit well for me. It makes me feel that we are putting the horses before the cart... it should be our choices over a big chunk of the game's story that would mold Ashe's persona and/or her feelings over some acts and people and not some big important choice basically right at the start that makes us lose a lot of what Ashe's character could have been.
Try to see from this angle: Locking Ashe's whole personality on three single aspects makes her feel too unilateral as a character instead of the deep, emotional and interesting character we got to know on the first 2 episodes. What I'm proposing is that we should have freedom to choose our actions: We should be able to choose if Ashe wanted to give Evellyn a back massage and grind her with her erection or, instead, give her a foot massage and have her tease Ashe. And, if we kept following a route of action for a prolongued period of time, it would eventually shift Ashe's taste to that route of action.
This slow shift would make Ashe as a character feel more real as a character or at least make the transition of her personality more smooth, we can't just push a buttom and choose what we want our personality to be, we mold that over time with interactions with other people and ourselves, with many different choices, good or bad.
And as an example of what I trying to propose is basically the MC in BaDiK. We eventually get locked in a route of sorts because of the choices we made over a lot of gameplay, but even after the lock we can get the MC acting differently from what his route should do, result of making certain choices over and over again. Now imagine how much different (and worse I dare say) BaDiK would be as a game if we were forced to choose a route right from ep2 or maybe ep4? It would ruin a lot of what the game was proposing.
My idea is: What if we still choose to act more submissive with some characters in EI, despite making more dominant choices overall? Ashe would still be more confident and dominant, but she would still like to act submissive with that character. This would make the gameplay better and way more dinamic and interactive than just choosing one personality and changing the course of the whole game and how some characters act just because of ONE CHOICE rather than multiple over a prolongued period of time.
This is just an idea of course, but it don't really matter much, I just feel that Ashe should be able to make more choices in the begginning of her journey.