Do you prefer to have an established MC or self insert?

[meowworkstm]

Hello everyone! I wanted to know people's thoughts on the MC of a dating sim:

1. Is being able to customize the MC the extra push that makes you play a vn?
2. Does it bother you when the MC does something you wouldn't do (assuming they're flawed for story reasons and not just bad writing), or is it refreshing that they are their own character?
3. Would you rather play a more story-driven game, or one with greater replayability/customization?

I ask this because I'm planning a game but I can hypothetically see myself going two directions with the MC:

1. Having an MC with an established backstory, gender, and personality. There are details in their backstory such as going to an all girl's high school and the presence of a lesbian love interest from said all girl's school as well as a straight love interest which would require them to be female.
2. Having an MC with a customizable gender, pronouns, and specialty (think strength, wisdom, speed etc.) Players will be able to have more individualized experiences and explore the setting in different ways, and I'd be willing to tweak details in the story in order to support this.

I'm really torn because I think most people would agree if you can include customizability or inclusivity, you should go for it. But personally I feel like once I've played a story/route once, I don't feel like playing it again even with customization because the story doesn't change enough (hot take maybe but VN's with customization often only provide the illusion of choice). I also don't mind an established MC if it makes the plot and relationships to the LI's more significant (think Cinderella Phenomenon or The Blind Griffin). I'm really, like, looking into the cost benefit analysis of this because I don't want to implement something that only sounds good in theory. But that's just my opinion, and wanted to know how much of a difference it really makes for other people.

EDIT**I just realized I've asked this question before aaaaaaa oh well I think the situation is a tad different and it's important for me to know this before I start planning a story around it.

[justloveme94]

Some thoughts!
1. No, being able to customize an MC is not an extra push for me. I play a wide range of different types of visual novels from Japanese and Western developers.
2. It doesn't bother me. Even with character customization, there will always be a suspension of belief. I have been seen both done well and really depends on the story and the story the writer is trying to achieve. I think the biggest thing about fleshed out characters is that their personality is consistent across routes. It always confuses me if the MC does a personality 180 in another route.
3. I love a good stat raiser, but find that you either sacrifice story for gameplay and vice versa. From a developer point of view, I'm always worried about feature creep and rather do one or two things really well than not accomplish my story, but I'm also a newbie dev.

[Apho]

1. No. More often than not, I'd just stick with the defaults.
2. It doesn't bother me. The way I see it, it isn't any much different from reading a fictional novel written in first-person.
3. If we're talking about visual novels, personally, I'd prefer a more story-driven game. Most of the time, if I'm replaying a visual novel, I'm skipping the text that I've already read on my previous playthroughs, and am only interested in seeing the other routes. I'd hate having to re-play the same mini-game multiple times.

[TheLemmaLlama]

1. Is being able to customize the MC the extra push that makes you play a vn?

If it's customization that interacts with the story in ridiculously robust ways a la the Developer's Foresight trope, I think that's incredibly rad and would convince me to play the game, yes. But that's pretty hard to implement XD

2. Does it bother you when the MC does something you wouldn't do (assuming they're flawed for story reasons and not just bad writing), or is it refreshing that they are their own character?

Gonna jump on the 'i think it's cool' train for this one :]

3. Would you rather play a more story-driven game, or one with greater replayability/customization?

Story is the #1 thing I want from a VN, but I also feel like there are so many story-driven VNs out there that it's hard to stand out to me and get me to pick experiencing your story over the next VN's. What would really stand out to me though is a very customizable game where the choices actually matter and changes the story in meaningful ways instead of just providing the 'illusion of choice', like you mentioned. I know this is really hard to implement as the amount of work you have to do grows exponentially with the length of the game, but I wouldn't mind the game being short if it lets you have robust, meaningful customization

But I will take a VN with a well-written established protagonist which only gives you choices that fall under what the protagonist would do, over a VN with customization that doesn't really have the effects that make customization fun, as it also hampers the writing because the protagonist has no distinguishable traits for the rest of the world/characters to play off of