There are several different endings for each of the main routes through the game, and while getting a “bad” one can be looked upon as a failure to help Tenzou achieve his goal, even these bad endings provide enough story context to make them feel worthwhile rather than like a “punishment” of sorts. Here, you not only replay the game for high scores, but also to manipulate Tenzou’s stats differently, and to make different choices in the dialogue scenes. Gal*Gun Returns, meanwhile, is at least partly designed in the grand tradition of arcade games, which means a strong emphasis on replayability. It’s a game that anyone will be able to beat with enough persistence, and it’s not primarily designed as a game intended for people who want to show off their skills. HuniePop 2 is, at its core, a fairly casual game that is about providing a bit of fun - and a bit of challenge - without overwhelming the player with anything too complicated. The differences here are as much to do with different game structure as anything else.
You can even make it all the way through the game only to discover that you haven’t quite said the right things or shaped Tenzou into the right sort of person along the way. You can fail one of the event scenes, meaning the relationship between Tenzou and the love interest he’s pursuing is irreversibly damaged in some way. And there are a variety of different ways to do that! You can exhaust Tenzou’s willpower during a shooting stage, which means he’ll end up with the girl who “defeated” him - not necessarily an unhappy ending, but not exactly the basis of true love. In Gal*Gun Returns, meanwhile, you can fail, and fail hard. To put it another way, HuniePop 2’s angle on long-term relationships is that its characters get to know one another, make friends and sometimes have sex with one another when they feel like it no-one in the core cast - including the protagonist - makes any sort of commitment at any point. It is, in a way, transactional, and the game’s honesty in confronting this aspect of modern society is quite refreshing. In HuniePop 2, sex is not some sort of magical soft-focus moment that your whole life has been leading up to it’s a fact of life that people get up to all the time - and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than two (or more) people being in the mood for doing something mutually pleasurable at that moment in time. HuniePop 2’s approach to developing relationships and sexual intimacy is what I would tend to refer to as both “practical” and “modern”. I’m obviously not talking about the cosmic space threesome here I am instead referring to what makes up the bulk of the game: the moment-to-moment interactions between the protagonist and the main cast of heroines. Probably the core difference in approach between HuniePop 2 and Gal*Gun Returns is the fact that Gal*Gun’s narrative is idealistic fantasy, while the concept behind HuniePop 2 feels a little more plausible. One could, in fact, argue that both games are about sexual intimacy in relationships, though Gal*Gun has always taken a more suggestive or metaphorical approach to this as opposed to depicting things explicitly. While wildly different in both concept and scale on paper, at heart both games are about relationships in one form or another - and specifically relationships that involve some sort of intimacy. If he fails to find his “the one” by the end of his “day in the sun”, he’ll be alone forever. In Gal*Gun Returns, meanwhile, you take on the role of Tenzou, a character accidentally made completely irresistible to the opposite sex, and attempt to help him find true love amid this chaos.
Before you can do this, you need to prove your worth by having as many threesomes with as many different pairs of women as possible. In HuniePop 2, you take on the role of a character tasked with saving the world by, ultimately, having a threesome with two ancient cosmic entities who, if left unchecked, will destroy all of existence.
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