Re: Xenotake (Vosmug game)
It's very much personal opinion, but I think gameplay in a h-game merely exists to put the smut into some sort of context. Xenotake does it pretty good; the hentai is easy to 'draw' in real life graphics in my head, then super impose that over where she is and what's happening.
That said if your chocolate bar's wrapper was crappily designed you'd look elsewhere. Trick is to make the presentation good so people buy your particular hentai bars, which is really what you were after in the first place.
Going with what you said, I think for myself (and a lot of others) it's similar to porn with a story; the only porn I can actually find hot anymore that's WITHOUT a story is amateur stuff (because it's not fake as fuck).
Otherwise, it needs to have a story of some sort, to make it believable, to give the people just enough characterization so you can see them as actual human beings and not "actors".
The trick though is to not push that line too much; with real life porn (and to a lesser extent hentai as it's drawings and not flesh and blood, although this doesn't make it any less of an ART FORM, of course), you don't want to cross over into full blown empathy or realism of characters, because then in a lot of situations (especially the ones frequently shown in this forum) you start to feel sadness and negative emotions towards the situation.
This is why it's actually a bad thing to make your characters TOO developed, because instead of getting off at them getting forcefully gangbanged, you'll then likely start to empathize with them and feel bad for jerking off about the situation.
I think Xenotake stays on the safe side of things, but gets close enough to the line that it's definitely got an enjoyable amount of storyline and characterization, but it's always shown in a way that we never really feel bad for Eerien or anyone else getting fucked in it, as Eerien usually passes it off as not seeming to mind that much and/or part of the job description, and other characters have even more positive reactions to getting fucked and so forth.
Interestingly, the only time none of the above applies seems to be dating games, where you WANT to empathize as much as possible with the characters, and as such you should try to make the characters as relate-able or pitiable as possible, depending on the characterization.
