So this is my honest review of the game. This review is long and if you want a TL;DR, I have provided one at the very end. I'd also like to point out that I am a huge gamer and I try to play every single game I can get my hands on, so all of my review (including my amazement at the act 2 writing and disappointment with act 3) comes from experience with literally tens of thousands of hours of other games.
To start off, the first time I played the game, I saw it as nothing more than a funny meme h-game that I can send to my friends as a joke, but I found that I began to somewhat enjoy the simple storyline. During act 1 I had this creeping feeling that there was something underneath the simple basis of an h-game that kept me playing, but not quite visible yet. And then, act 2 happened.
After act 2 started, I noticed a change so big it felt like I was playing a game made by a completely different developer, but in the best of ways. Previously, every character in the game was clearly not given much thought involving their actual personalities or stories, as befitting them being essentially porn characters. But after act 2 started, every single one of the main characters was suddenly given actual great writing. And not just great... amazing writing. I actually... care about these literal porn characters. Aside from the writing, the game was just like it was in act 1, but just objectively better and with new additions. Words cannot describe how unfathomably good the writing is in act 2, and how good the pacing is, but that's where we get to the biggest disappointment of the entire game: act 3.
Aside from one of the cringiest action scenes I've ever seen during the act 2 finale, I had a lot of hope for act 3 and thus far after completing everything available it does not look good. Everything that made act 2 so amazing was gone. Not just the storyline and overall freedom you had but even little things like the concept of exploration are just gone. I understand that the game explicitly warns you before the finale, but I just thought it would be like the Act 1-2 transition, where the game is the same but just simply better, but unfortunately it just seems so much worse. The entire game is traded out for essentially a war strategy game (a crushingly mediocre one at that) and the genuinely amazing storytelling of act 2 was thrown out for a brand new war storyline, which comes out of nowhere right at the finale without a single ounce of buildup. It's so jarringly bad that I felt like I had to hold my jaw before it dropped to the floor wondering what happened to the storytelling of act 2. But that's not to say it's all bad in act 3. The scenes meeting some of the characters after the time skip is great, and meeting Veronica in particular was genuinely heartcrushing, but that's the only good thing I can say about act 3.
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My honest letter to the developer: Act 2 was breathtakingly amazing, but act 3 was a big misstep. The transition from act 1 to 2 felt like a genuinely amazing progression of the story, but the transition from act 2 to 3 literally feels like it completely ruins the player's experience by taking away everything that made act 2 such a great game and turning it into a completely different style of game with a completely different storyline that comes literally out of nowhere. But it's not a total loss, as I can personally see one way it could continue on in a way that fixes this issue.
What I would recommend doing now is continuing act 3 but turning it into a sort of punishment to the MC for being careless and having ideas of conquest towards the town, making him realize that his past ideas of controlling the town during acts 1 and 2 have led to untold misery for the people he cares about, until he finds a way (presumably either from Gramps or Artifact) to go back in time just once to the defining moment in act 2 just before he goes into the church as he corrects his mistakes and finds ways to prevent the all-out war from starting, perhaps even at the cost of endangering himself. At some point after that, MC would gain the ability to go back to the war timeline at will (presumably through some new Nexus ability) to learn things à la Ocarina of Time to progress the story of the original timeline as he struggles to keep the war from coming, all the while the overall storyline continues. This would preserve and continue both the amazingly written act 2 and the few great moments of the war storyline in a way that makes complete sense. The war is cool, but it should absolutely NOT take center stage as some new primary plot of the game because it completely subsumes every ounce of storytelling before it, making the player's experience completely meaningless while replacing the game before it with something far worse than even the very start of the first act.
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TL;DR: Act 1 is good, but act 2 is where the real game is, and it's definitely worth the wait as the basic characters turn into genuinely amazingly-written ones. Do not play act 3 as it ruins the entire game, but if you are going to play it, then I highly recommend that you create a save just before you start the finale of act 2 so you can go back to it.