>>8836020
Not a game dev but yeah Godot sounds like your best bet. Some people have done some pretty impressive work with VN engines like Ren'py (Monster Girl Dreams comes to mind) but if you're an amateur coder then you should stay away from engine work. It's complex and lengthy. From what you've been saying you'll just need some kind of scripted event handler wrapped around the combat, which could probably all be housed in some kind of menu system. Shouldn't be too hard if the logic is like Start/Continue game->Menu state->Event State->Combat State->Menu state. That's basically what Fire Emblem is, though obviously the combat far outweighs the start of chapter events.

>Summer Time Saga comes to mind
To be fair, I believe that their tech debt is catching up to them. I don't think it should be taking this long to finish, but hey, maybe it's really shitty code.

>I wonder if showing off too much might dampen the reward
Well, everything I said is just my opinion. Not like I can tell you a golden path to go down that will 100% work and please everyone. At this hypothetical stage anything could work if done right. Once there's an actual game it'll be easier to give concrete "Do this instead of that" feedback. And if you actually finish your game you'll be ahead of roughly 99.9999% of every other western eroge developer. But hey, maybe try a lewder version of that model, see how you feel. Could be good practice either way.

Anyway, I gotta start posting images to go with all this text so here's some fanart of a shortstack h-game called Paccsu