I tried the matchmaking elimination method and immediately a few things came to mind.
- There are times when you aren't able to talk to Osana, at all. From what I saw the only time you could send her to do a task or do her task is after the school day ends. At lunch she talks to Taro and in the morning she just wanders around with her own personal stalker Raibaru and has random conversations. This is jarring as fuck and I found myself trying multiple times to talk to her to no avail.
- You need to fill up a "love" bar over time by having both her and the alternative guy talking. If you fuck this up on the first day, or your memory isn't very good to remember the details of Osana's conversation, you're basically fucked and you can't recover before the end of the week. The buffs are mandatory, otherwise it would be impossible to fill the bar in time. For Alex's young fans and new players, it is very unlikely you'll succeed on the first try, and you'll have to start the week all over again, wasting your time and immersion. The game isn't fun in the first place, and it definitely won't be fun the 2nd time around.
- A good amount of your time is spent slowly walking around and following Osana to eavesdrop. This wouldn't be a huge problem if the environment was stimulating and fun to navigate, but this is not the case. She walks slowly everywhere until you tell her to go to the fountain, where she runs directly there and leaves if you aren't fast enough to get her alternative lover there in time, locking the option to do it again, wasting an entire day.
I want to touch on this failure a bit further. In of itself, the idea of having a method or two that requires some prior knowledge is not bad. The problem with Alex's design is, as far as I've seen (I cannot be arsed to photograph enough underwear to deal with doing all the shit), he's not just locked everything behind a tight schedule, but he's locked everything behind the SAME schedule. You need to go into the week and
immediately commit to an approach, otherwise all the less lethal paths seem to pass you by. Then, you have to fall back onto convoluted lethal paths, which are time and trigger sensitive, and if your playing like a semi-normal human being, IE seeking stuff out when you don't think you can kill your target, you'll miss them.
He's locked everything down so tightly, and he's removed the 'fallback'. In Persona, its possible, if potentially difficult, to grind any mistakes you've made away to just eke your way through. You have a brute force fallback. In Yansim, the obvious brute force fallback is "stab her to death" and has its consequences. But she has a body guard glued to her hip, so its functionally impossible to remove that bodyguard, unless... You go through a convoluted, time sensitive, non intuitive process that
also overlaps. If you want to get rid of Raibaru to just stab her to death, that in of itself is a separate commitment.
If its friday morning and your ventures haven't succeeded so far, you made a mistake or missed a trigger, you don't really seem to have a fallback option. You've just lost. At absolute best, that is excessively restrictive game design, at worst (and far more likely) its just garbage built by someone who doesn't understand that every option does not need to be almost mutually exclusive.
The dingleberry on the cake is that this problem would compound week to week as you need to have developed your skills in advance for future methods, and then have precognition of which skills you need to execute a scheme half way through it, weeks in advance.
), but it really is so much easier to get Raibaru to talk to the martial arts club leader then stab Osana, or place bugs and kill Osana with lethal poison, or give her an emetic and drown her in the toilet (somehow Raibaru didn't follow her, and it was honestly hilarious how after a whole three hours of class Raibaru zeroed in on her location on a different floor and started screaming "WHAT'S WRONG?!")
