Before I throw my own wall of text at you, thank you for writing all of this out. I know more than most typing takes time and effort, and I'll make the effort to match.
I know people have issues with the intro, but re:Dreamer is meant to one day be a long visual novel (at least 40 hours per main route). In that context, an intro of an hour or less (much of which you are given the option to skip!) is not just justified but mandatory.
I very firmly and passionately believe gender bender is a kink of contrasts. I'll skip the pseudo-intellectual lecture about how it's a genre uniquely suited to building around the singular pillar of what is ultimately the only story a person can ever tell when you strip it to its base element (what it means to be a person) and jump ahead to the pith: knowing more of who Zach is as a person before the transformation even happens is necessary for giving the type of contrast I need for the story I want to tell with him.
To that end, I have given Zach an intro that sets the entire tone of the game as most of its topics and themes, such as:
- The process of "showing the work" of who Zach is and how they change matters far more than the destination.
- The ego Zach has built about their self-styled maverickish intelligence is a crutch and protective wall of isolation that is making them miserable but which they cling to because it's easier to be smart than it is to be wise.
- Their toxic relationship with their mother, who acts as a sympathetic antagonist where it's up for the reader to decide if she's redeemable and someone Zach or Zoey can trust again, a dramatic foil across generations who herself is a victim of an abusive mother, a black hole who has shaped and warped Zach's views of women (often for the worse), and a larger-than-life figure who casts a suffocating shadow over him or her, both as an impossibly high bar to match and as a control freak.
- That re:Dreamer is going to be a psychologically-focused story with a very introspective protagonist, as shown through a lecture that also introduces the concept of a personality matrix (as it is a feature in the visual novel) (I don't have a psychology degree, but I have taken a few semesters of it at college and have maintained at least a passing interest in it).
- How Zach is stuck and wanting to change but needs a powerful catalyst and someone to react with to make that change happen.
I'll readily admit that there might have been a more condensed way to do that, but all my thinking on the intro over the last few years has only reinforced my view that it has to be there and it's about as lean as I can make it without cutting away the meat of the story to compromise brevity over depth. It acts as a sort of skill gate, because to be honest, if a player stopped after less than an hour, there's not much of a chance they'd like to stick around for more nor care that I think context makes porn way hotter.
I have many thoughts about gender (as you might suspect lol), but I'd like to think I have enough respect for the topic to avoid pandering with easy layups that I know would please certain crowds. Doing so would be a disservice to readers when I know could deliver something better and more meaningful. re:Dreamer isn't really "a transgender game" as some have tried to frame it and I reject that limitation; in fact, one of its design goals is to widen someone's views of identity and present a more nuanced view than "this character was always a girl." It's a weird celebration of the uniqueness of identity meant to be thought about with deliberate ambiguity meant to foster that. I'll sometimes use modern queer terminology when it makes sense and I can't claim I don't find myself rambling on my soapbox every so often, but I'm hardly a gender guru. I'm a weird person with a weird genderfluid identity who doesn't have anything even close all the answers, but I have confidence in my ability to ask good questions.
I love having a lot of attention to detail and like when someone notices the time and effort to put into it. The expression system helps sell the nuance of the story, and I'm shocked that neither my method of separating faces into distinct eyes, eyebrows, and mouths and the exponentially greater range of facial expression I have access to nor focus on sound design is common. I wanna be a quirky bohemian auteur, and I can't understand how people hate making the parts of a visual novel I love to tinker with. It's a multimedia format, and the more I embrace that aspect, the more those parts synchronize to tell a story that punches far above its weight class in impact.