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(1 edit) (+5)

100%(?) the game last night at ~14 hours, here's a fairly exhaustive review on my thoughts with the game. Buckle in, this could get long

EDIT 9/17/24: Most of the Gameplay nitpicks and bugs mentioned in this post have since been fixed! massive kudos to the dev for going and getting these done.

The good

Extremely charming graphics, makes stellar use of bouncing and stretching sprites to give motion to everything without having to animate every single attack and gesture (and there are a LOT).

Writing and soundtrack that synergize together to set a wide variety of moods from intimate to silly to suspenseful, with minimal need for suspension of disbelief.

The magnitude of options presented to the player, it wasn't until the final world that I realized that each loss to any standard or boss enemy nets a random and unique new ability to use. And it was at that point that I realized I'd only scratched the surface of what options the game had on offer.

Extremely tasteful implementation of the fetish, as the player can almost entirely avoid it if desired (besides two story-related instances), And its presence in gameplay is otherwise unobtrusive, neither being thrust upon the player nor being an afterthought.

A varied and interesting selection of minigames tied to side quests, which necessitate some notable brain power in a few cases.

A wealth of optional bosses to test your moveset building skills against at for each stage of the game.

The world has a lot of stuff going on, such that a sequel is absolutely possible without some "mysterious new threat we somehow didn't know about" emerging.


The bad

Great difficulty curve, right up until it isn't. It felt as if things were getting progressively and meaningfully harder right up until the fifth world. After that, the regular enemy difficulty inexplicably drops as enemies spend their whole turn inflicting 1 turn, easily ignored debuffs and their general DPS also drops compared to previous worlds. The game does still get harder past this point, but the player keeps powering up the whole time and pulls too far ahead. It feels like if there wasn't that one step back that the game would be perfect in that regard.

A few too many instances where button mashing was needed

Inconsistent use of vore scene replay interactables; all optional bosses can be refought infinitely, but only the first and last optional bosses seem to have dedicated interactables to see their vore scene if you didn't lose to them once first, necessitating an intentional loss otherwise.

Vore scene wedges absolutely can break the game in half. Take for example that the best healing per turn you have access to through shops/loot is 45 hp per turn (which is enough strictly speaking to get through the game and optional bosses, but requires smart use of things like damage debuffs or respin wedges into stuns), but a basic enemy drops a wedge allowing for 150 hp healed per turn with no strings attached, which far and away out heals literally every enemy in the game.

No fast travel until basically the very end of the game where its likely no longer useful.

Theres a few fetch quests requiring you to grind for a specific enemy encounter.


The disappointing (a few gameplay-related nitpicks/potential bug reports)

Several wedges that don't indicate they're non-functional outside of battle do nothing outside of battle, such as coin chance wedges, the aforementioned healing wedge (lava glob), or shield wedges (which sometimes do and sometimes don't, it seems inconsistent).

Shield health stacks when enemies get shield while already having shield, whereas the player gets their old shield value overridden with the new one (potentially causing them to lose shield in the process).

Burn probably shouldn't apply the same damage to the player and enemies, 3 damage per turn is negligible vs the player's health pool, whereas poison does actually deal different damage to the player and enemies to keep it relevant vs both.

Getting vored removes any shield hp you have, even if you don't actually take any damage after getting eaten, which seems bizarre.

Respin wedges allow for many of the most completely broken builds (again, lava glob letting you heal 150 hp), while also counting as 3 turns for summons and for the forgotten sword. Jaques' buff potion move also stacks for an extra turn each time he uses it, allowing respin wedges to let you stack many turns of damage buff.


Some things that are definitely bugs

When Lucky hammer is used, both the animation and effects for greenwing bow are used instead.

Rock Paper Rouletta only seems to use scissors.

Cider doesn't seem to actually cause self-inflicted debuffs to tick faster

Desperate solution's damage buff ticks right after your turn ends, so you never get to actually use it.


Now for those of you who won't read further (because explicit names and spoilers will come after this) please don't confuse all this to mean that I dislike the game, I LOVE this game, 8/10, genuinely had so much fun playing through it and was sad when I ran out of things to do, I just think that the best way to improve is through criticism, and I want this game to be the best version of itself possible. Play the game, even if you're not into vore, still play the game, its great on its own merits.


FINAL WARNING, END GAME SPOILERS BELOW

Probably not something that can be easily remedied, but I find it a bit disappointing that when the moral of the game and the final speech before defeating the final boss is about being ok with not knowing the outcome of something, that the seemingly best strat in the game is building a very specific combo out and then spamming cards, either temporal or normal, to get off the combo with certainty.

Wrapping around to the damage sponge issue. I feel like this is a result of the Lord Varis fight. He's got a very large health pool for that point, but that's okay in context because Jaques is there to help (and oh boy does he help a lot), but it feels like the bosses from Snasda Sharptounge onward all didn't take this context when creating their hp pools, leading to some battles, particularly the Orange Jaw optional boss and Badrem (unless you abuse said optional boss' ancient sword reward) being kind of a slog with the colossal health pools. I think it's gone on too long when I've memorized their attack pattern cycle without having to write it down.

Why is it that there's seemingly no way whatsoever to refight Elspeth and the final boss? Both seemingly would have vore scenes on loss, but neither have a memory stone or any way to just refight and lose on purpose once you've beaten them.

And to end this all on a lighter note, damn did the romance side story line feel nice to watch, just loved how organic it was, A+ for that.

Interesting, I agree with most of what you said. Except about fast travel, I rarely play games with 2D systems and RPG Maker, so I ran the entire game trying to defeat all the castles, and when I got to the last level I noticed that it was impossible to continue, so I received fast travel and traveled through all the kingdoms clearing all the sidequests and vore scenes, for me, who rushed the game, fast travel at the end was perfect, because if it weren't, I would give up on finishing it, it came at the end when I realized that I needed to travel through the worlds.