For that playthrough, I'd only fully 'died' once and since I was one loss away from being put into a gone state anytime I reached full submission or got dazed the fight was pretty much over unless I used the special dazzle attack and knocked out the middle guy immediately because he was the one that'd always do the daze attack.
Ah, that makes a little more sense then. Yeah the gradual states that add up are there to encourage you to finish battles fast, rather than just slut your way through them (if you're trying to go for a "clean" run). So if you lose with only one state left, you've essentially lost twice, you're dead bun (or fucked bun) walking. And yeah, Daze becomes a problem then. But that doesn't worry me as much, that's working as intended. On the other hand if you're playing with few states racked up and getting nailed with Daze over and over, that should probably be tweaked. And, to be fair, you shouldn't be getting hit with Daze CONSTANTLY with one state left either, but if you get to that point you're probably screwed regardless.
I guess it mainly became an issue because the groups of three regular hyena's only started to constantly use daze after I got out of the underground passage so by that point I'd already saved over previous saves n didn't really have a way to fall back on an earlier save to where I wasn't one away from entering the gone state.
Yeah, issues with that attack aside, always rotate saves, especially in an RPG. I TRY not to do anything super cheap, but the nature of the game format (branching paths for example) means it's very possible to get caught in a situation you didn't expect and might not be aiming for. Always good to have a rewind option. Helps with scene collection too.