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When I saw the extended list of content warnings I was sort of worried I'd have a little trouble, but then the game wound up being a lot of fun anyway. Good stuff! More in rot13 below

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Hi! The one who was reading the earlier games with the polycule here. This time I just read it with one of my gfs and she cried a bunch. Strong thumbs up

Just finished up the 2.0 update, and of course I love it. This time around I allowed myself to tinker around a little bit with the options, as I was feeling a little overlevelled by the 2/3rds mark of the first world so I tuned my EXP down to 50%. I then had to turn it back up about 1/3 of the way into the expac lmao. 30/30 spells, 100/100 beasts and sticks, and every sign. Still not sure what tip#62 "a divine power" is referring to, but carrot+bat is enough god power for me for now. I'll have to come back to this again some time, thank you~!

... oh also uhm physical immunity prevents Beasts from gaining mana from attacks. Decided to honor system that one out 'cuz it was kinda silly

Went through this just now so that I could be properly prepared for HAZEL STICK 2.0. I'm properly delighted. I got to Shandowrd and my girlfriend said "this person might be the best at making games", and I agree. Top marks silly little game. I think my favorite enemy design has to be the uh shell guy from the ice zone. It just feels so absurdly large and crunchy. I learned that you can cast both Wish and Nick out of combat, and accidentally dumpstered the golem like that. Good times all around

Hell yeah!!!

Excellent stuff! Love the use of one toolkit of spells to sort of paint a palette of creatures that have a distinct sorta... idunno, texture to them? I kind of love it when RPGs are built out with an obvious pile of blocks like that. And then you get to play with the blocks! What could be better, really.

For anyone else reading: took me just a few hours to beat, involves a lotta sniffing around to find the last few sticks but if you run dry on immediate leads you get a lot of good options to find guidance. The battle formulas are super straightforward and easy to understand if you look close, and there's a few interesting consequences of how spells and stats are set up!

Proud to report that I've used this game as a fun voice-along with my polycule

Keeping it to remarks this time! This just feels like the most comfortable way to give feedback for now

Katana Doll lost its mask!

Katana j.214H isn't *as* awkward as 214H, but it still feels kind of bad to draw it as a card, since (unless you use meter) on a Full Break it feels like you're nearly guaranteed to lose your OTG, and on a Part Break it feels like you're straight up putting yourself in danger on-hit

The new timing for Hiyoko Dive is cool as hell, real potent, a lot easier to connect, too. That said, I feel like maybe its stun is a little too good. It feels like most anything I would have used 50% meter to Cancel Shift for, I'm way better off using Hiyoko Dive for. This is hardly the worst thing in the world though, since CS is easier to perform and has a different feel to it so I still use it

Sitting down immediately after asking Momiji out on a date makes her act strangely. She transforms back and forth and slides to the left, and if she does manage to reach the player and sit down, she can get stuck there.

First and third pillowcases are confusing right now. No clue what that's about right now

Difficulty seals are cleared both by noncontinue and by restarting the application. Particularly, the "no continues" seal being cleared by not continuing is sort of jarring, seeing as noncontinue, by its nature, already drops you off right next to the bell that would allow you to voluntarily clear it

Looks like all the "Curse level go up immediately" pickups are gone, so for now I suppose I'll be splashing around the DnD nightmare if I feel like farming curse w/o using the debug option or beating on the cursed dummies.

Speaking of the cursed dummies, they highlight something fairly notable: If you have say, 90% progress towards the next curse level, and you gain 50% all at once, you still start the next curse level at 0%. This can cause a lot of curse% to go missing

Speaking-of-speaking-of-that, 100% curse doesn't seem to tip you over? Just one of those kinds a things

The paper wall foreground really is such a romantic spot to ask your GF for Stuff.

Lastly, I know Matsu already has that big hat, but. Could be bigger. Sky's the limit, really

Well! Okay!!! Thank you for this, what can I say

Enemies are able to tech while their card is broken — unsure if intentional

Summoning weapon spirits at Momiji's dresser & the Outer Zone dressup spot places the weapons far enough away that they don't come to you

Fighting Momiji gives the neat unique round intro, but being KO'd by her in the same fight leads to the "How did you read this?" intro

Crashed after fighting Gashadokuro w/ ghost lantern assist @ the Outer Zone training arena (error below). Prior to that, fought Suu w/ Gasha, ghost lantern on its own, DnD, and a few samurai

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ERROR in

action number 1

of  Step Event1

for object obj_character:

Unable to find instance for object index 183503

at gml_Script_anon_gml_Object_obj_enemy_gashadokuro_head_Create_0_1828_gml_Object_obj_enemy_gashadokuro_head_Create_0

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gml_Script_anon_gml_Object_obj_enemy_gashadokuro_head_Create_0_1828_gml_Object_obj_enemy_gashadokuro_head_Create_0 (line -1)

gml_Object_obj_character_Step_1

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(My GF Draida says hi!)

(I'll add onto the post as I find things)

"Giving up sins" returns you to 2 lives but you maintain your fractional 1-ups, so it's kinda inconsistent

Defeating the naginata doll with Bird Slam causes both it and Gaji to repeat their post-fight lines like 5 times each. Haven't tested this with other match-end dialogue

Bow 236H "Butterfly Heart" seems to have been replaced with a 3-hit horizontal arrow, but this doesn't guard break an enemy weak to Butterfly Heart. The card for 214H "Arrow Storm" seems to have the wrong input written on it — it reads j.236H

Attempting to start a bout with the "Nobody" enemy on point crashes the game. Enemy kills added to your history by the Num0 cheat don't save to the file, meaning you have to do it after every program reset

214L can be done during match intro to reveal enemy cards

The samurai to the west and east of the bridge arena are possibly a little too healthy — or at least maybe shouldn't be quite so easy to hackeysack around if they're at risk of drifting into an arena activation line or a stage border, respectively. That plus the one behind the paper screen, similar feeling

4-curse green ninjas at home bursting on me feels like stubbing my toe, even if I can walk around them and they gave me a way to test how bursts worked. Speaking of, the ninjas and the double-empty-doll fight are kind of highlighting that bursts work much better for enemies than for the player

Can't see Ayu Maid behind all the point items from other catches. Wish I had a taller, thinner tube to throw Ribbon in and watch her tumble

Thanks very much!! Clearing that got me able to play the game, and now that I've exorcised the demons in my brain by doing 4-curse dolls arena for a while, here's a few more

• Hiyoko flew over and landed on one of the sitting dolls' heads while I was fighting. How rude
• The killing blow of a round can strike the next doll as she's standing up, before the bell
• Defeating the gashadokuro on the bridge banishes the arena boundary, but it gets up for one more life anyway
• Also, gashadokuro doesn't seem to cause burst lockout during its super
• Speaking of that area, man trying to get up the platforms when a samurai is camping it is oppressive
• Katana 214H feels kind of short, height-wise? And/or maybe also activity-wise. It's just really hard to catch a juggle with it. Not that I'm sure it would really be good to, but Vergil brain is supreme.

Oh, this is real bad, reinstalling the game isn't fixing it, and I can't find the save folder(?) Hmm.

Uh oh. I don't remember where I closed the game last night but now it's just crashing immediately on open. I was messing around with Matsu on point, I think?

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ERROR in

action number 1

of  Step Event1

for object obj_character:

Variable <unknown_object>.buffer_start(101665, -2147483648) not set before reading it.

at gml_Object_obj_character_Step_1

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gml_Object_obj_character_Step_1 (line -1)

I hope the camera bug is as replicable as I made it sound!

And I mentioned stress/mikiri not because I don't know what they do — obsessively digging through the twitter backlog educated me fast — but because of the audio/visual experience of waking up that first time when I *didn't* know, with like, the colors shifted due to Stress, only just then realizing I had bandages on my bar, I was like "oh, have I really done it now?" and had that kind of emotional response which was... probably unintentional? But strangely powerful. A feeling like I had to be dragged back in pieces. It probably wouldn't be the first time for her, after all

As for the fishing rod... I'm gonna trust your heart on this one lol. Godspeed

Hey I just learned about this game like 2 days ago and I'm obsessed. I scrolled the whole Twitter down to April. Goodness gracious. I'm a trans girl doofus who's been playing way too many games for far too long and also suffered from feelings of being hostile/"sharp" so being handed GG gattles and a trans-lesbian polycule who want to give me shelter and purpose in [hitting these sick parries], I can't help but feel like I'm just drowning in the pathos here even when the structure is still being worked on. Never even thought of anything like being a doll before and I'm just like "I wanna be her?" but like I've wanted something like Volcanic Viper in my gender for ages so it makes some sense

ANYHOW, feedback!!! I know dev can be a quick-moving thing and I don't know what you're already aware of, so I'll just lay out what I see

• Momiji>"Give up Curse" seems to just crash the game in all states for me
• Using the bonfire shrine specifically at 0 curse seems to crash
• I want to bite Momiji more!!! But I can't for the life of me figure out what the condition for the prompt is
• Taking the "no more" option after losing my last life has the "I'M NOT DONE YET" popup happen for a few frames — even in the memory/nightmare scenes
• It's rad that Gaji has a special line for when she kills you on 0 lives, but also she wakes you up before you game over which is funny
• It feels like Momiji can get really, really, really, really, really fixated on putting the one dress on you — to the point where we had a good cry in the hot springs and I'm like "god this scene..." but then she's like "BY THE WAY," ... I thhhink I remember her doing it off of the numpad 7 scene as well? It's funny how it's happening so much that it's just become part of the characterization in my head lol.
  
• I played one of the older demos and was pretty amazed at the equipment screen laying out a lot of good info, but on second thought I guess updating tutorials for systems that are in some amount of flux is probably a bit of a house of cards situation, isn't it
• The point requirements for unlocking fashion stuff are way out of scale at the moment, it's like 5k points per green ninja but... was it 20 million? For a palette change? And with lives seeming(?) totally irrecoverable at the moment without taking a continue or a go-home, and both you-lost options taking you to 0 points — yeah.
• With how often I've gotta restart the game EXE for one reason for another (bugs, and clearing my save to show all my girlfriends the opening nightmare), I'm somewhat curious about whether an in-UI reset function would be reasonable
• Dying in the pig ninja fight or the duel with deadname doll and taking a go-home makes it so that next time you go to that area, the camera pans over there and gets stuck a mile away from you
• Something dark inside of me yearns for the fishing rod to be a viable weapon
• Speaking of fishing, I keep messing it up because something in my brain sees the card say something like "right, H" and tries to hit them at the same time instead of in sequence since, well, that's how all the attack cards are written after all
• Between Doll Stress and Mikiri, when I was starting out I felt a fair amount of uncertainty and stress at dying and waking up at Momiji's house and looking at the color palette and noticing the curse bandage-bar and being like "... was it always like this? Did I break something (narratively, in Suu)? How do I fix it? Momiji, are you there???" I just felt so bad for Suu help her. Losing health in a video game is so normal but *waking up wounded* is so... it's such a feeling

Thank you so much for all of this, I feel like even if a ghost floated up behind me and stole all of my hype for this game I'd still feel insanely blessed to have had experienced this level of excitement and feeling seen for the past couple days of poking around this big ol' thing

5[♥], 2[♥], 2[♥]