Alright honest take:
1.) What's our role in the story as a player, are we playing the role of spectator or the MC himself?
-A lots of things didn't hit my curiosity for the first 30 minutes of the game, our MC having a generic English/Hispanic name while the rest of the campus being in Japanese setting/scenario, even the writings in the blackboard are indeed in Kanji.
-It's hard for me to wrap my head around why should I invest my time playing the game when the opening aren't that interesting (sorry if my word offends you).
-There should be a hard emphasis if our role here as a player is either spectator or the MC himself. There's a lot of ways to approach this.
A.) Having our MC background fit the entire setting is one but a lot of VN games overlook, things like name, ethnicity, and character design MATTERS. Having said that, some portions of it just misses.
B.) IF the MC's background is already set and deliberately design to be that way, make sure it's slowly introduce and discuss in the story specially IF the game is all about our MC's environment to begin with.
C.) Or better, there's no need to name our MC, having nouns like "Me" , "Senpai" , "Sensei" is already enough. That emphasize the fact that the game is meant to be played at the MC's perspective not to ours. Have a strong grip to what the story is all about, it's nice having customizability but that can hurt the nature of how it'll affect future endeavors.
2.) Dumping 25% of the side characters from 30 minutes of playing a 7-10 hours long VN game is NO-GOOD. You can argue about it but you'll be in so much information that it's hard to find the value for some side characters moving forward, since you've already filter out like 25% of them already to which one would you like to know more/invest your time with. The rest of the gameplay is solely for the entire purpose of advancing through the game which just eliminates the entire purpose of having a side character to begin with. It's not just for the story, but what's their value? What're they meant for? What's their contribution? Why they're suppose to be relevant?
3.) Slowly incorporate everything. You're not running on a ticking time bomb, please. The amount of information I read everytime I click the next dialogues are absurd. You want to let your audience sit and let the dialogue be absorb fully, there's no need having PhD on literature to play/read a VN dialogues. It's fine and excusable in scenarios where it is UTMOST necessity, but not 75% of the entire time.