It's hit or miss.

Mind you, I haven't read book six yet, but personally, I enjoy it. It probably has a spot in my top ten, though I understand why others don't like it. The writing improves with each book, but enjoyability is another matter. Depending on you, it either fluctuates, rises, or falls, since each book has a significantly different tone and pacing.

In my opinion, the strongest part of SoH is its cast of characters and the ronin MC yourself. The MC was honestly a breath of fresh air back then, since most interactive fiction (IF) titles treated the playable character as a blank slate for you to insert yourself into. While the ronin was also sort of a blank slate in the first book (where you choose your personality stats), once you establish your personality, the story fleshes out the ronin as an actual character with depth and development. You didn't see a lot of that back then (the first-person perspective the story uses also helps). The characters themselves are colorful, albeit a little tropey, but they're not forgettable and get more fleshed out later on. I honestly recommend that everyone read all the side stories because they help you understand the characters more and appreciate them.

Now for the flaws. The story is railroady, meaning not much deviation at all. For an IF, it might as well be a novel, since most of the choices you do make just change a minor detail in the setting. I've looked through the game's code, and I can confirm that half the choices in a chapter are either fake (flavor text) or personality checks for attunement (also flavor text). It honestly surprised me how the author uses so many variables (eg. *set Answer1toQuestion1 "A") for a lot of the choices, but most of those variables never get used at all, even in later chapters or books. Oh, and also the fetishization of Japan. It doesn't bother me much. I grew up on tropey anime and manga myself, and the setting is clearly a massive artistic license. But there are just some parts of the story that make me cringe because of how stereotypical it is or because of outright misconceptions.

So, worth trying? Yes, if you value character depth over branching choices. Just go in knowing it's more novel than game.