With how much I loved Mercanoid I'm ashamed it took me so long to get around to playing this!! I still just adore your writing quirks and these characters were just wonderful, but the star of the show for me is always the flow/glow system. God its so good, I should replay Mercanoid for a 5th time.

Anyways, the more linear nature and focused story was really fun! I felt more like I was playing through a story instead of the resident evil-ish dungeon crawl. Which, while I love that type of resource management game, I think the linearity is a strong suit of this format! I grew attached to the main three characters which I hadn't expected and the more focused nature meant I could get it all done in one evening, likely contributing to that extra attachment. That same focus also left things feeling a lot more balanced, with Mio I could do every side quest and even on hard with reduced exp I still would end up feeling really strong which was fun and rewarding, but could leave the last few fights feeling a tad tension-less (not at all a complaint, just an observation). While in the manor, the lack of side quests nor additional things to grab outside of the alt weapons made the final battle feel challenging. Which!

Hopefully I'm far enough down by now to not spoil anyone. The final fight is really well done with the swapping and curse mechanics and endless status effects making each action feel much more weighty because I had to keep track of so much!! I just had a blast fighting Amy. I did have a minor bug where activating a charged attack with Helen on the first turn of Amy's fight meant that she just couldn't act for the rest of the fight. I could replicate it once, but then it never happened again after I tried to do it 5 more times to get a better bug report. Sorry I couldn't give a more specific cause.

I've probably rambled on long enough, thank you for the wonderful game!!