Caution: Spoilers ahead in this review!
Yet another jam game that I really enjoyed the premise of! It's not hard to just get a win, but I ended up messing around with this a lot, losing against the hardest fights to lose to and winning against the hardest fights to beat. I also did Neither + All Losses and Neither + All Wins playthroughs, and the latter especially was fun to figure out.
Losing is pretty much always better than winning because the stat difference is minimal (perhaps bugged based on what I saw in the editor, but maybe I'm misunderstanding it?), but the skills you learn are powerful. Reflect and Beg For Mercy are easily the strongest skills. The former shuts down anything except regular attacks, which is a borderline instant win against most enemies, including The Sun. The latter can be combined with Poison or any attack item (which don't remove Mercy status) to whittle down an enemy's HP while it can do nothing.
My Neither + All Losses route:
- Lost to the bridge Slime since I had to lose to at least one Slime, and this was the least tedious time to do it.
- Lost to the bridge Goblin to get Beg For Mercy since this was now the least tedious time to do it.
- Lost to a Plant to get Poison Pollen
- Lost to whatever. The Crab and Nothing are pretty fast, and I also bounced Beg For Mercy off the wizards to lose those ones fast too. I filled in the gaps with Plants since Poison damage scales with HP.
- I entered the final battles with full HP and just used Poison Pollen followed by Beg For Mercy and waited for each.
My Neither + All Wins route:
- Killed the bridge Slime to unlock the right side of the map.
- Killed two random Slimes to gain power.
- Killed the bridge Goblin to unlock the cave and continue to gain power
- Killed a Hunk. The goal of this fight was to let it heal me a bit before the next couple fights. In hindsight, it probably would have been safer to do this before the bridge Goblin so that I'd be hurting myself less in confusion, but I never tested this.
- Punched the first Tower Wizard to death to gain access to the Magical AUA. This was what I needed the majority of the HP from the Hunk for.
- Used the Magical AUA to take out the Wizards guarding the Differentiator and CaveBack. They get OHKO'd with the Magical AUA, but they still get a chance to attack before I can use it, so I needed to have some HP leftover for these.
- Killed Nothing by spamming the Differentiator.
- Fought a Slime to reheal with the One Percenter before the final bosses.
- Used the Differentiator to attack and the One Percenter to heal against The Sun. Before finishing it off, I made sure that I was at lowish HP so that I could hit The Moon harder with the Differentiator.
- Spammed the Differentiator against The Moon and killed it before it did anything meaningful.