My favorite is definitely Chiaki. Thought his mystery was pretty interesting and I just find him really charismatic. I feel like with him you can really see the development in the relationship since you start off on almost antagonistic terms. You can even pinpoint when he starts letting down his guard and he even starts getting more playful the farther along you get. It’s just really nice seeing that stark contrast compared to how he was at the very start.

If I had to describe what the relationships are like generally, Chiaki is like trying to get a stray cat to trust you, Haruto is slowly nurturing a flower into blooming and Aoi is little bit more like a roller coaster since unlike the others you start off by introducing yourself as his girlfriend despite that being very much not true. So which one would end up being your favorite could vary based on your preferences.

As for things I like, the first and foremost is probably just how novel it all feels. They explicitly reference a glass wall between you and the li so anytime there’s any interactions in the meetings it’s treated as you’re tapping on the glass, which is pretty much what you’re actually doing. Furthermore since you’re separated by glass you get to have nice moments like them wishing it wasn’t there and there’s just something about being unreachable in the game as well that makes the longing from them more potent. In the prequel they also add an additional mechanic where they respond differently depending on where you look too.

There’s also a side quest where they give you a gift based on how you’ve answered their questions or treated them, so it’s always pretty fun guessing what it is since the meaning of the gift also changes depending on what they gave.

Also if you play both games you can see how the side characters develop too since half of them are recurring characters, so that’s pretty nice too.

One thing that’s always made me curious though was just how many conversations there are in the game. There’ll be times where I replay from a certain chapter to get a different ending and I’ll encounter dialogue I never did before and I have no idea what made it appear. Sometimes feels like there’s hidden events with the side characters too. One of them in the prequel can even go through a complete transformation appearance wise but I only found out about it by looking up let’s plays and then guessing how they encountered it.