The games are great, but they can get pretty shocking with some of the routes and bad endings. >< But that's why it's called Dramatical Murder haha, the title delivers what it promises. You should totally give it a try if you want to and have time since it can take quite some time since there's a LOT of text (of course, being a visual novel). There's also the sequel DMMd re:connect, which is also good to play after the main game! Yes, there's 4 characters (+ one extra which you can get if you complete all the endings of the other characters) and it depends on your choises who's route you get to play. It offers quite a lot of variety. ^^ But yeah, I agree that it's kind of going to change the whole point of the game if they change it so much ><