I find best friends are usually only done right when the best friend is a female friend who you usually just end up having sex with. but yeah if they are a male best friend usually just kind of annoying or an ass who just want to ignore. At least for Male protag games.
From what I find when I looked into yeah unfortunately the game hasn't seen a update in quite a long time. Which is unfortunate because it had such a good story.
I mute almost every adult game I play most of the time the sounds just aren't good and if there is VC it just feels weird to me unless it's really good.