While we're on the subject of game design, does anyone else think the limited days is stupid? I don't know about you, but I don't find anything fun about being rushed along on a leash. If I'm playing a sandbox game, I want to be free to explore and try new things, not to have to aggressively micro-analyze every goddamn minute I use.
That depends entirely on how it ends up being implemented in the game itself. If I remember right, while the inspirational games of Persona 3/4 did have their built in time limits of "Big Boss showing up on this day" or "Complete dungeon by this day", they were both rather forgiving in that regard so you didn't end up with a useless save file after saving at a point in time where you really weren't prepared for what you had to do. Keep in mind these game's time advanced by player actions and not by a realtime clock.
Persona 3 had a tiredness mechanic that only let you delve into the RPG dungeons for so long without your characters becoming exhausted and stacking the RPG elements very heavily against you, thus more or less forcing you to leave and come back another day unless you wanted to slug through everything with greater chances to miss, have your characters fall down, do less damage and take more, no more free heals because your characters would just go home and sleep, and finally let the enemy crit you to death. However, the night before the Big Bad arrives this mechanic is absent, allowing you to grind as much as necessary to get the levels/gear drops to stand a chance and continue through the story. Persona 4 instead just let you fail to clear the dungeon, told you that you fucked up then simply rewound the date by a week so you could try again. So, while the deadlines in these games gave you a sense of urgency, there were still ways to deal with them even if you completely screwed up.
With YanSim, it's more just an arbitrary decision Alex made on how he wants you to play his game. Alex himself and maybe Info-chan just tell you "You have this much time to kill/remove X", and that's supposed to be repeated nine more times. It's more like being a part of a flawed base than anything; there's no way for the player to observe the student body and stalk Senpai in gameplay to figure out which student is a rival and how far they've progressed in their relationship with Senpai, so instead Alex literally just tells you "This student is the rival, get rid of them by this date or game over".
I'd like the system a lot more if the time/gameplay flow of YanSim were completely reworked so that instead of an arbitrary cut-off date for a game over, after a certain point in a rival's relationship the player character starts losing sanity permanently until the rival has been eliminated, thus forcing you to act fast and immediately and go far more stab-happy than you might otherwise play. With a rebalancing of elimination methods with scaling severity (matchmaking, minor to major humiliations, relationship sabotage, injuries, and finally murder being your FUBAR nuclear option) it may be far more interesting to play and let players find their own solutions to the problem instead of "Here's an invincible bodyguard that can now smell gas, get fucked lol".
Naturally, that won't happen.
