Hello!
You'd be surprised how little text you need to intro a game actually, and how much players can figure out what is happening on their own.
I don't want to skip your work! If you give players the skip intro button before they know how long it is, how will they know if we want to skip it or not? Ideally in a game you want to see the intro, and you might want to skip it on second playthrough, but I'd never want to skip an intro on first play.
What's the absolute bare minimum of communication you can show in the intro to successfully get the story across? Do people really talk as much as that in real life? What you do put into the intro will feel so much more alive if it's cut right down to exactly what you need and no more. Players are seeing your work for the first time and their attention is expensive; they will just shut the game and go elsewhere as soon as you have taken up their time unneccessarily. How quickly can you show them the real guts of the game, the gameplay?
I'm not saying you shouldn't write or have a story or have characters with develop, but your game is a particularly amazing example of consuming the players time for a very long time before they actually learn anything about what the game is actually going to be. Take them there first, then introduce the longer storylines and have the relationships develop.
I have more opinions on visual novels; I think they do the player a disservice, but they are massively popular so I"m not going to criticise them or your goal to be a hybrid too much. But in being a hybrid I think your game could very easily be better than them, it could easily hit a bigger audience.