Andromeda Six is a high quality visual novel and definitely one of my favourites, but I find one particular thing irksome. 

In a game with multiple love interests, I like to romance the male characters with male protagonists and the female characters with female protagonists. I have gone through A6 up to and including episode nine and I can say it has the same issue as many others in the visual novel and interactive fiction genre. 

The romance scenes are very clearly written for the heterosexual relationships first and then tweaked for the queer ones. It isn't a problem in itself to have say, a female character acting more masculine or a male character acting more feminine, but rather the railroading into these roles when I might be roleplaying the opposite. This creates a disconnect and pulls me out of the story. 

The language used and actions taken in the romance scenes assumes one masculine partner and one feminine partner, although some scenes are more ambiguous than others. Minor examples of this masc/fem dichotomy (I want to keep this spoiler free):

• Using the word chest rather than breast for the female protagonist's upper torso area when her love interest is described much more voluptuously.
• The female protagonist tilting Ryona's face up for a kiss despite the fact that Ryona is quite tall for a woman (almost as tall as Damon as per in-game artwork). 

These imply a more masculine female protagonist, where I like to play a girly girl. Disconnect from the story. 

The male protagonist romancing male characters has the exact opposite issue - he's always the feminine to the male love interest 's masculine. Since there are five male characters to two female characters, I have a laundry list of examples that I found were abrasive to my enjoyment of the gay male romantic element of the story but it's a) a bit more than I want to get into and b) a bit too explicit for the public forum. I will say that it has similarities to early aughts yaoi manga... which I realize outs me as an old biddy but w/e lol.

Some people might say that I should just not play the romances, but I like romance and I want to play them. These romances just need some finesse. Otherwise I love the game, and keep up the great work!

🡱