well... that's true, but many people don't want to try hard to get their fapping material (you can judge it from the sheer size of posts in many boards where is asked for full saves or complain for these or those requirement for quests or endings). So while I agree with you, this is a decent middle ground.
But if you try to get all the scenes by-hand (pun intended) instead than using the teddybear shortcut, or try to get a "virgin" ending (not really virgin, but just without sleeping around) or don't upgrade the character beside a certain point it becomes much harder. It's just that kind of game.
I fully agree. It's "choose your own difficulty" type of game. Simply - don't collect semen and don't use sex tech and it becomes very difficult. Especially if you want to progress affection quests which force you to swap characters around (so you can't focus XP on just 3 of them).
Semen collection and sex tech is just an easy mode. It's a casual difficulty. There is no problem with that. But they kinda fail with encouraging players to play "hard mode". There should be "positive karma" with its own h-events (put the whole romance with Leon there and add some more).
Maybe it's just me but I appreciate hentai games which utilize hentai mechanics and h-content is an integral part of the game. Most h-games, especially RPGs fail at that and h-content is just on the side - you can play without seeing any of it (or you play for ~2 hours and can't even see any of it), doesn't affect gameplay at all and most of the time you only get different endings depending how much you enegaged main character in h-events. What's the point of that? You could be playing some visual novels or even browse some hentai cgs instead spending hours in a RPG - probably with far better art and story.
This game was overall okay, fallen was WAY better. It was too easy to get to H scenes and just felt like a vanilla buildup style rpg game, nothing really in the story or writing style separates it from other genres. That said, I do hope that Fallen is given another look in its H style. I have yet to find a similar game to it that tops it.
Once you got past certain event in Fallen, it was just a visual novel if you were there for h-content. You could walk from event to event, without any gameplay in between. At least in Claire you have fulfil desire/sub/dom/costume requirements which require story progress, money and some work during first run. And you can't get everything in one run (which is both good and bad - kinda annoying but at least there is some point to play it again).
Story wasn't anything special too. "Tough heroine works as adventurer and eventually becomes slutty" (Fallen) is just as common "carefree heroine works as adventurer and eventually becomes slutty" (Claire)...
Art is a matter of a taste so I won't comment on that.
I enjoyed Fallen but I vastly prefer Claire for h-content inside battles, hentai mechanics in battles and character progression, costume variety and dom/sub system with varied events. Fallen was just a decent jRPG... with some high-quality hentai events on the side.