Nice catch, I think the monochrome effect always draws the player regardless of if they're invisible or not. It might be depth sorted on top of the explosions too.
The explosions are very strong so they're balanced out by having a finite number of uses before you damage yourself enough to lose the powerup. I think them spawning is a holdover from DDG1 (the arena code might be reused with no changes) but I cut them from the main game since bringing one to a boss fight would risk making it unwinnable.
I might have mixed up some Reaper's Castle and Caldera Keep settings, I'll need to look into this.
Hey, I'm not sure we're on the same page about how strong the Nitro Bomb's explosions are, because I double-checked and confirmed that they barely do any damage to your opponent, only really hurting yourself:
If you meant against the regular enemies, what makes those explosions so much stronger than the regular bomb powerup that they needed to be balanced with recoil damage? Seems more like you were trying to do a Decoy Effect rather than counterbalance an overpowered item. The only benefit I see is that the explosions are *larger,* but there aren't many levels where you can end up getting beset on all sides by enemies like this, so its potential uses over the other powerups are very small in practice. This honestly seems more like a "three-second cooldown" situation at most, but even if you still want to go down the route of permanently-limiting its uses, you should at least give them a separate ammo counter instead of taking away the player's HP.
Though as an aside, I thought I'd mention that the ammo limits were one of my least favorite parts of Gun Princess 2, and I was glad to see that DDG2 did away with them, so I still recommend the cooldown option of the two.
Oh, and I forgot to mention this one last time: dying to enemies in the Unfinished Swan room removes the player's shadow.
EDIT: Another glitch with the Hikkori Skull: phasing upward through a jump-through platform lets you phase again before you land, just like phasing into a wall does. EDIT AGAIN: Same goes for if you Hikkori-phase upward from a standstill; you get to do it twice before it gets disabled, even if you don't touch another platform in the meantime.
EDIT 2: Hey, was it intentional to let other players jump on you and hurt you while you're in the middle of Hikkori-phasing? Because when that happens, you're still invisible during the knock-back portion, and you don't become visible again until you regain control and your flashing i-frames start.
I think what's happening here is that the explosions are balanced around enemies getting hit repeatedly by multiple explosion objects, but players get mercy invincibility after being hit the first time so they only take a fraction of the intended damage.
You're right; I double-checked, and the regular bomb's explosion also only deals a minuscule amount of damage to opposing players, though this is masked by the bomb itself dealing a reasonable amount of damage on contact, pre-explosion. Even if this oversight got fixed, though, I still think that having the Nitro Bomb deal recoil damage is going overboard. You didn't add any similarly-massive drawbacks for other objectively-improved versions of powerups like the long whip or the axe/boomerang sword; at most, you just gave them a cooldown period and made them rarer. You should do the same for the Nitro Bomb, maybe even limit it to being a pricey shop-exclusive item like you did with the gold leaf, but no recoil damage; that's going too far.
Anyway, I stumbled across another one: if you're one whip's length away from your opponent, you can still hit each other with a down-angled whip attack, even if you're directly in front of each other instead of below at an angle:
Weirdly, it doesn't happen if you're too close to each other; you have to be at the edge of the whip's range for the discrepancy to occur.
EDIT: I almost didn't realize your intent with the jumpthrough arrangements for Prison Maze because the Skybase tileset's jumpthroughs are just flat clouds at the top rather than being full squares that can fill out the intended wall/prison bar shapes. You did a good job at making sure all the other available themes had square jumpthroughs, though.
Finally got this one on video! If you do a running jump into the bottom corner of a ground tile at just the right spot, you'll get stuck there until you move backwards out of it:
Keep in mind it happens with ALL solid ground tiles, not just bricks. Looking back at the footage, I think it might be related to the "get pushed back after landing" bug I mentioned earlier since the afterimages stick around until after I escape the wall.
Oh! I just thought of another potential solution with the Nitro Bomb: even if you don't change anything about how it works (which I still think you really should), you could just have the boss rooms overwrite the powerup like you do with the Balloon Cake. That way, even if players switch back and run out of ammo, they still have the given powerup to fall back on.
Stumbled across a few more regarding Chibie. First, her wings don't get shadowed/inked in the Unfinished Swan room. Second, her wing animation freezes if you cat-grab onto a wall while floating (so if they're in the middle of closing when you grab the wall, they'll stay in that partially-open state until you detach). Third, even when gore is disabled, the healing effect when she kills an enemy is still blood-red (though I'm not sure how much you'd count that one). I'd upload some more screen captures to show these, but itch is breaking my images again.
This has been bothering me for a while, but I think I finally know how to voice my concerns: the frame of the spinning spike log that hurts you doesn't look like it should hurt you. This is because it has the bottom of the spike outline bending downward (by a lot!), making it seem as if the spike is pointing towards the camera and the player would land behind it, but that's not the case. I think you were going for one of those slightly-downward-tilted-camera perspectives like what NES Ninja Gaiden does, but the problem is that the entire rest of the game is strictly straight-side-view like the Super Mario games, and this perspective conflict makes that hazard unintuitive. Please redraw the log's harmful frame so that the spike graphic isn't cutting into the log graphic, or at least so it only has the spike's outline overlapping the top pixels of the log. Maybe also make it so the harmful frame has a brighter spike for added clarity.
Also, it might be a good idea to raise the border walls of Canyon Bridge because with a Cat Sunflower, a Hikkori Skull, or even just a bit of teamwork, you can get on top of them.
