On Delicious Emily’s Holiday Season, a time-management game with a romantic subplot in which you can actually make choices for the character. I can see this may have set them up for some problems about sequels down the road, but I was pleased with it, and it made a good occasion to talk some more about the interplay of gameplay and romance.
Speaking of casual games with developed plots, I am seriously disappointed by Jojo’s Fashion Show: World Tour. I’m guessing someone else took over the franchise after the tragic dissolution of Gamelab. But the dialogue doesn’t snap, the characters are dull, the fashions are less attractively drawn, and the gameplay is neither as challenging nor as interesting. There’s a portion where you can create your own items of clothing to go into the show, which sounded like it might be another attempt at the product-mixing concepts in Chocolatier: Decadence by Design and Passport to Perfume. But once again, this isn’t actually as interesting a mechanic as it could be. You’re always creating clothing to match a specific style, applying colors and patterns to a very limited selection of silhouettes: the result is that it’s hard to make an outfit that is a resounding failure, and fairly easy to come up with something worth a large number of points; and the process of doing this is all about experimenting with the colors and patterns until you’ve hit as many of the style features as you can. Perhaps this is an attempt to keep the game from being too difficult, but the results are (in my opinion) kind of limp. I’m still waiting for a tycoon or time management game where you design your own products but the gameplay on both sides really crackles. (This is — or could be — basically a deck-building problem.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Deck-building problem? Sorry if I’m uninformed, but could you explain this term?
In collectible card games, a lot of the what the player does is build decks for later play, making the most of resources and coming up with interesting ways to use the elements.
In Jojo’s Fashion Show, that might mean creating elements that could be successfully used in multiple outfit styles, and perhaps some that worked especially well in combination with others. The strategic design of a wardrobe would be more interesting (in my opinion) than optimizing each outfit for a specific style.
I’m curious as to the genre of the previous game in the ‘Emily’ series, if it also has romantic elements to it or not. Considering that the designers seem to be okay with people choosing not to pick either of the provided romantic options (given their 75% rejection rate in beta testing) it almost seems like they are hoping to create a series of games representing the trials and tribulations of Emily’s romantic life before finally offering legitimate options at the end.
… or they may simply not care one way or the other, preferring to focus on the other gameplay elements.