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Okay, first of all, multinational legal issues outside of the US still affect the US, as I briefly touched on later in that paragraph. Second, I am also an American. Third, don't take the bad day you had out on me, and project your tendency to look for people to make personal attacks on onto me.

The Free Banking Act won't stop them from doing this sort of thing in the rest of the world (US laws can't stop overseas activities, as much as the average American seems to not understand that America does not own all countries), which they've already been doing a ton of for years. And a lot of Steam and Itch's customers are outside the US. Sure, they may not be able to ban Steam from using Visa or Mastercard entirely, but they can still place bans on a consumer level, preventing them from using their cards to make purchases on Steam. Which could still be enough to put pressure on Steam.

I have already switched to using Discover wherever possible, even before this happened, because this isn't even the first time Visa and Mastercard have done this sort of thing, just the most high-profile. And previous times didn't even have someone else pestering them to do it; the companies just did it entirely on their own. Unfortunately, many places I go still don't accept Discover, no matter what Discover's advertising may claim. Online shopping is not the end-all, be-all of existence.

You don't need to be in Steam's Big Picture mode to use Steam Input and do custom controller bindings. That was the case a long time ago, but it was fixed several years ago. You can do all of that stuff in any mode now.

They might actually not be anywhere anymore. Each girl only has a few unique events implemented, and each unique scene can only be seen once. And if you pick the wrong option to where you miss out on affection points, you're just out of luck forever.

So yeah, this game, like with most other sandbox-style visual novels on Itch (that are far more complex than this one), is set up to where you can find the characters based on a combination of location, day of the week, and time of day. Except Morning and Afternoon are counted as the same thing in this case, so there are really only two times of day... and it's more like day beach/night beach are counted as separate locations, etc.

Except other sandbox-style visual novels have a system somewhere in the UI that shows you what locations they will be at certain weekday/time-of-day combinations. This one is simple enough that not having it would be forgivable, if not for one major issue: there is also no set pattern to their appearances like those other games have. Their appearances are hardcoded into a pseudo-random mess with no rhyme or reason aside from the majority of Caitlyn's scenes obviously being at the bar. Other games will typically have a character always be at a certain location on Monday and Wednesday mornings... etc, and if they are somewhere different from normal, that will be made clear through dialogue. Also, repeatable interactions are normally a thing...

The way everything works here is that each location/weekday/time combination has exactly one unique scene, after which you always get one of the RNG shorts from then on. With 6 day locations and 5 night and 7 days of the week, plus one additional unique scene the very first time you visit one of those 11, that is 11*8, for 88 total one-time scenes (most of which don't involve any of the girls, and some of which are basically the same as one of the RNG shorts), then RNG shorts in each of the slots you've already covered before. Exactly one of those scenes requires someone's affection to be above a certain level (every character is just extremely horny), and before you have enough you get the RNG shorts instead just as you would if you'd already seen the unique scene for that slot.

P.S. With this implementation, adding any new scenes will require either adding new locations or breaking existing saves, one or the other.

I've been looping in a slave bit for an hour with the same events over and over and over with no end in sight. This is... legitimately bad. There is some severe copium going on with downvoting the OP. There is no reasonable way to defend game design like this. Even before hitting this, the game is massively padded with one of the most repetitive, monotonous grindfests I've ever experienced. It's definitely trying to ride on concept alone.

This has been bugging me for a while now, but just so you know, katana are worn with the blade facing up, not down. There are other Japanese swords that look fairly similar (in particular tachi) that are worn blade-down, but katana are specifically forged in such a way that they are weighted to sit blade-up for the purpose of streamlining the initial drawing motion. That being said, early on the MC was generally shown wearing his with the blade up, but as the story went on it started to become inconsistent.

P.S. The scene after sleeping where the MC and Ryoko leave to go to Sakura Town for the "Small Strengths" quest triggered before the "My Purpose" quest was finished, when the former quest clearly states that you need to complete the latter before it will be safe enough to do that (as well as the dialogue from when Small Strengths was first acquired).