itch.io

I didn't have Hizi high enough level for her to even be "just drained down to low level". It straight up ended the game and gave me the catzilla ending. Geeb is right that the boss has far too many mechanics in its favor. Taunting doesn't work half the time, as the legs stomp whoever they want, AOE from the tail doesn't even care, bleed and burn take away from your severely lacking turn economy to counter unless you want to just soak up an immense amount of damage, drains heal for an exorbitant amount which puts you at a health, level, and turn disadvantage (cause in the multiple tries I did to beat the stupid cat, I only struggled free ONCE EVER; so you may as well just count that character as lost till phase change), and having to chew through multiple thousands of health to get to any meaningful damage in the span of 2 turns is not only unreasonable, but there's only 1 or 2 strategies to do so. This is an unescapable fight, which means you HAVE to fight it out. If you DON'T immediately gameover from losing it, then you may as well be since you're just put back at the beginning of the game. Have fun grinding back through the slog of enemies just to encounter the same boss, but now even stronger since it gobbled your hard work from before.
Here's some questions for you:

Why do the tank enemies have so much damage output, apply debuffs, and have self-sustain? (Bleeding heals, for whatever reason. Not even just for the vampire bat enemies, but the starting area pigs, too)

Why do the healing enemies have high damage AND a revive?

Why do draining enemies have buff abilities and spawn in multiples during a single venture?

Why do structures outclass your entire team? A draining totem is pretty much a death sentence for a run if you don't take it out in 2-3 turns.

Why are there buffs that are far better than you as the player have access to that don't have duration and will quickly overwhelm you? Looking at you, overclock.

Why have enemies specifically around that steal your items, that are so polarized in either completely useless/near mandatory, which are nearly impossible to get due to the cost and rng of the shop, and you have no hope of stopping them in the early game?

Why do you, as the player, never have advantage in any fight, no matter how deep into the playthrough?

It's hard to believe you just shrug off a lot of these frustrations unless you just do not value your own time or enjoyment of a game, and are just saying this as inflammatory dialogue.

So what I'm hearing in refute to Geeb's genuinely understandable gripes with thought out explanations:
"Well it doesn't upset me to have to run or reload every fight cause I can make a couple enemies not loop their typical move and do their counter move instead, except for one of them that counters everything; just get lucky bro."

Not only is that NOT a viable strategy, but defending poor design choices negatively impacts the author. If something is an issue that drives a majority of people away from a game, shouldn't you let them know what it is instead of blindly yes-manning? The balance in the game is way off. You are constantly fighting at disadvantage no matter what you do. I only beat catzilla by getting lucky and using 3 miniguns, which I was lucky enough to get from the rng store after 17 pulls. Otherwise, I would lack the damage to counter the tail while also being outdamaged, outdrained, outhealed, and stuck fighting the boss after already being in a fight before it shows up.

You spend 90% of the game crippled and bleeding, enemies are in cohesive teams that cover weaknesses EVEN WHEN THEY'RE ALL THE SAME TYPE, items are expensive, do little to actually help you unless you get like 2-3 good ones, thieves show up and STEAL them (which you have no feasible way to stop in the early game), the bosses have every ability under the sun, better turn economy, better versions of your abilities, and no counters besides luck.

In the current state of the game, the only viable way to get anywhere without breaking literally everyone you meet (which isn't guaranteeing success, btw), is to powerlevel Hizi by dumping as much of all 3 characters' levels into her as you can and using Judgement off cooldown. And keep a flamethrower on hand, or else tinkerers will just negate everything you ever do forever.

Honest suggestions:
-Reduce the health of buildings, or make them take bonus damage. They shouldn't have more health than my entire team COMBINED and solo carry the enemy.
_Reduce spawn rates of certain enemies. Stacked enemies that can drain are an automatic loss, since only one party member can drain, which means you will be outpaced in losing levels.
-Enemies should not all be at your party's average level. There should be a variance of levels that make it so a single enemy is the weak link, making it viable to target them to win the fight. When each enemy has counters to everything you do, and is the same level as everyone else, you bog down the game to a crawl or a flee-loop.
-Each enemy should be specialized into something. The boar being able to do high damage AND being a tank is the lowest offender- the impish mage is both a powerful healer, has high damage, can revive allies, and has plenty of health at matching level. The rat puts down buildings that trivialize the fight in the enemies' favor, while also having plenty of health and damage itself. The slimes (and other enemies that drain levels) need to be the first to be defeated, and you have to do so by draining THEM. Otherwise, they'll just keep spamming drain, outlevel you by a mile, and you'll gameover with everyone broken. But then you just end up in a loop of drain>get drained>drain>get drained, all while hoping the one character you have tanking everything else (cause if you attack the slime, the others will heal it while it barriers itself, preventing it from being drainable UNTIL IT'S ATTACKED), and the other character trying to heal the tank through the damage of every other enemy.

unescapable, lose the game boss fight, btw. There goes all my progress cause I hadn't saved recently

Ah yes, and when I finally got past the point of running from 90% of fights, a boss fight way above my level showed up. This game is unplayable

there needs to be some heavy balancing changes- the beginning of the game is near impossible with the amount of enemies that can outmuscle you, outheal you, AND outdrain you IN THE SAME VENTURE. It's like slamming your head into a wall where you lose xp each venture rather than gain any.

Did I win yet?

It was happening whenever Azumi showed up to the meeting after Shiori's accident at Azumi's second weight stage. I just tried the latest update (1.5.6) and restarted from the beginning and it seems to be working now.

I'm having an issue where there's a missing image during one of the meeting scenes. An 'a/a_side_2_bloated_smile.png' is missing and causing errors.

Edit: it seems that all of 'a_2' is missing its images

That would have been a good thing to know... Ah well

Maybe I just have horrible luck. But fr, the new honey would spawn underneath the red ants or like 1 tile away and they'd hoover it up immediately. Was pretty rough.

Interesting concept, but horribly unbalanced. Every honeypot spawned within 8 tiles of the enemy queen the entire game. I got trounced because I couldn't get any food whatsoever.

Great work on the visuals and baseline, though!

The ability of a pred to consume lower level pred cards? I seem to run into the issue of stacking up too many preds and not having enough prey

The secret boss is awesome, fantastic work overall!