Are complex routes bad?

I've been wondering this constantly as I see obvious answers that point straight to the heroine the player is aiming for. One of the problems with complex routes are that other areas of development will suffer, because time that might be spent on refining artwork or story are spent on piling on branches in routes, now the reason why studios would bother doing such a thing is that it's more gratifying knowing that throughout countless dead-ends and apparent influences in the story the player found the one route that fits their tastes. A pro for complex routes would be that a simple route, outlining a simple route as lacking various or difficult choices, can defeat the purpose of playing a VN being the fact that the player ideally chose VNs over a movie because they get to influence the story-line to a considerable degree.

Naturally JRPGs and other VN-esque genres are not applicable here. I want people who respond to this to consider these little snippets before posting.

[size=14]I honestly think that simple decisions (e.g G-senjou no maou) or convoluted ones make no actual difference (as long as you don't end up bad ending all the time)[/h]

Either complex or simple is fine for me. It's not much of a factor.

I gave the topic a bit more thought and put in an edit, also are you playing VNs for the purpose of enjoying the story or influencing it? Both?

Depends on the complexity, I'd say. The route does not have to be blatantly obvious, but if figuring out what you need to do becomes nigh impossible without relying on walkthroughs, it's going a bit too far.

It definitely adds strain on the developers, but whoever manages to pull it off successfully would have one helluva game that would attract many attention. I'd like to point that Katawa Shoujo Act 1 (the demo, not the complete game) is one of those rare games that has some pretty complex and interactive choices that DOES allow you to influence events - and even introduce those that you did not expect - but as shown was pretty damn hard to implement properly.

Ultimately it's between the balance between quality and budget, and given unlimited amount of cash any passionate (and not lazy)developers would've made their games so immersive that it's like being there for real.

Majorly I do it for enjoyment.

I would argue that if a VN is tough enough that a majority of people rely on a walkthrough to finish the game-it's legitimate, it just appeals to a crowd of gamers who want more of a challenge, or have plenty of time to waste. It's just like why people play Rogue-like games where the chances of winning the game are near the zeroes, it's gratifying to reach the end through the many accumulated efforts of your previous playthroughs. This is a slightly situational topic-an exception to this reasoning would be that the VN bases a game-changing flag on a completely insignificant event, like if choosing between top ramen and a seafood omelet (without giving clear intention of what the outcome would be) for breakfast was what caused the world to implode, because it was basically the studio putting in these death-flags for the sake of forcing the gamer to play longer (increasing the value of the game).

There is that to consider, yes, but you should at least get some idea of what you did right or wrong to get to the place where you ended up in the story. The time it took me to get to Tomoyo's route in Clannad is a good example of this -