I found your profile after Ren mentioned Where is Mabel? and since I took part to the Metroidvania x MGGJ I was also curious about this one. I didn’t have time to play it during the rating phase, so just posting my late comment here.
Battle
A lot of work on the monster battle game, and cool presentation! Dragging the creatures on their slots and then effect cards on the creatures felt natural.
I could also click on a creature to highlight it but it did nothing.
About mana cost: I thought it was just hardcoded to 2, and only now after playing, I realize that the two “water” drops in the top-left corner actually represent 2 mana points and that the “water” is actually the same as the “spirit” icon in the top-left HUD.
Because all illustrations are animals, I also thought every card was a creature, then noticed the creature icon. Well, some Magic the Gathering cards have the same issue with illustrations, and you need to read card metadata to know their nature anyway, and the descriptions make it clear too, so I guess it’s okay.
I realized you could draw by clicking several times on the deck. I thought it was just to show the next card preview. It’s odd that we have to do this manually, unless there is some tactical reason (that is, always drawing full hand is not the optimal move sometimes?). Or is it just to give the “material feeling” or drawing?
Generally speaking, I think action flow and feedback could be improved. I wasn’t too sure how the battle damages were applied. I managed to get a total of 7 attack points in one turn but attacking the opponent at 10HP would do no damage at all instead of reducing their HP to 3. Is there some summoning sickness to prevent dealing damage too fast? Also unsure how defense works when creatures attack each other, is it stamina that recovers at the end of the turn as in Magic?
I think there should be more interesting decisions. For now, I see that the main decision what whether to increase attack instead of defense at the risk of losing a unit next turn if opponent attacks with their own creature (in which case it’s very important to know if summoning sickness is applied or not).
This could be helped with cards having more varied (but balanced) attributes, such as a big creature that costs 3-4 mana but is much stronger than the others. Looks like max mana increases by steps of 2 every turn with full refill, so that’s an opportunity to have cards with higher cost, otherwise you end up throwing a bunch of weak cards at the end, which is cool for stacking but a bit monotonous.
Bug: after opponent creature dies, stats remain
Bug: I spammed Space to quickly play advancing turns, but without monsters I got defeated. Then the game froze.
(I know, fixing bugs late like this is not funny… Well, I’m still fixing the level for my own entry, so nothing is impossible)
Art
Cool design based on cards. A funny twist is that the Magical Girl of Heart is definitely not the “heartiest” character. The heart and diamond costumes unfortunately both overlap on pink/red but that’s how the card symbols are done… They still differ in shapes, with roundy vs diamond shapes, so it’s OK.
Music
It’s cool!
Visual novel
It’s not super clear what happens between battle phases. Between phase 1 and phase 2, the character’s max mana suddenly drops to 2. I suppose it’s just a technical reason as the fight restarts, but it gives the impression that character has weakened and we don’t really know why. Generally speaking, I think the lack of animation and narration makes it hard to understand when the opponent takes an advantage, and it often desyncs with what you see in battle (the characters keep talking about “how can he survive” but to me I just reduced their HP and I was in a good shape, etc.)
Voice acting: Unfortunately, apart from the antagonist, the voices seem to have low bandwidth or even saturate when characters are shouting. I understand the importance of mic and recording quality now.
The antagonist’s voice is really good. But… he laughs a lot. He laughs when the script shows laughter. And he even laughs when there is no laughter in text. And he laughs for a looong time before his huge attack, I thought the voice files were mixed up and I skipped the text short after the end of the laughter, only to notice that he actually started saying the attack’s name and accidentally cut it. Apart from that, I made a point of playing the full voice audio anyway, which led me to sit in front of my screen hearing incessant laughter, and people around me wondering what I was watching. But it made me smile.
To sum up:
