Adamstan posted a link to where he outlines the differences between the all-ages and r18 versions a bit on another site, but the relevant part was that Episode 1 is largely the same. It wasn’t until Episode 3 that he noted some larger changes. In that sense nobody needs to feel like they’re getting cheated out on characterization and story development for playing the all ages version.
r18
I suspect most VN cuts are along the lines of what AzusaChan mentioned, essentially doing some minimal edits to make things acceptable to save time/money. The only one I’ve played was Nekopara which really only seemed to go as making things not explicit while still being super obvious as to what was happening. The censored version didn’t really make things better as far as family friendly imo, it felt like more of a political cya. If I had a kid that was mature enough to read the all ages version I would have said fuck it and gave them the r18 version.
I knew about the existence of the patch but I didn’t want to use it also to make it easier to follow with the club, I thought it would be hard to manage if the character counts are suddenly all over the place
Same here. The other issue too is that I’m in the US which… it’s been a few years, but this country has had some unfortunate precedent set for this kind of material so I’m just going to assume people in this country should avoid that content even if it’s being distributed. Way back when I saw there was an entry in SteamDB that indicated they had been working on an adult content patch as DLC for the Steam version, but with things like the Steam school uniform problem and the content itself being potentially illegal in the US I can see why it was left in limbo.