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Although it was mentioned by someone else a while ago, I wanted to ask again if there were any plans to clean up/replace the AI assisted backgrounds in a future update. 

edit: examples include background art at the barn, gym, both hot springs backgrounds, Christmas scene , Iono's/Peach's/Tifa's room, all bathrooms, and possibly peach? her left eyebrow almost looks like it has an eyelash in most art but is fine in her idle position in her room.

second edit: goes without saying but I don't expect all this art to be done in an update, but seeing gradual improvements over time would be appreciated. 

This is actually one of the things I dislike about the idea of a NG+. this seems more going into an AU where Mila is more prepared for the battles she faces. I mean, the sheer amount of content to be added with this addition would be more like creating an entirely new game. right from the start, winning the scripted "Vampire" fight in the woods (Chapter 2) would change the games canon. For spoiler reasons, I won't delve into all the scenes that would be changed but there's way too many to put here anyways.

Glad to see some more kinds of repeatable battles being added! A lack of repeatable battles before one of the late-game areas is accessed is one of my main issues with the Main Route and I'm glad to see that the Vampire Route seems to not suffer from this issue. I'm also glad to see the slime cave get more content!

Regarding the update, please don't rush the update. If a May release for chapter V-3/Fallholt is needed, that's understandable.

New Fallholt seems really interesting, I can't wait to be able to run around the place again. out of curiosity, is the casino going to be open? It was the only way to get gold without fighting or selling stuff so it would be pretty useful in my opinion.

Update on this situation: the max level at this point is like 10, not 8. and I was level 9 at the time of the battle. but other than that, I just wanted to say that the main thing that bothered me about the boss fight was not the difficulty of the whole fight, but rather the ridiculous amount of damage she does with no warning in the final phase, especially considering you have no turns to prepare since you need to attack her for her to enter her final stage. The immense amount of damage she deals makes it so that defeating her at level 5-6 feels like gambling, just hoping that you land a critical hit, or that her bite misses. Some things I had in mind were a potential warning for the bite, or just outright reducing it's damage considering it deletes half of your max HP or more  if it hits. Although generally the fight is fine: difficulty is good, and mechanics are great!

the idea of a bad ending that's literally just Mila struggling to remove a muzzle and being unable to bite anyone is actually hilarious!

another thing I noticed, this time on the Vampire Route. The vampire hunters inside the towns are fairly weak after chapter V-2 and some training. buying a ton of SP-replenishing items makes it so you can spam fire spells that attack all of them, and never worry about backup. speaking of which, even when I targeted one at a time, backup never seemed to work properly and would only display a message but never actually did anything.

I believe you've talked about this in another comment but I do want to bring this to your attention again, the subject being the St. Viviene fight. remembering my own struggles with this, I decided to give fighting her on a maxed out file a try. the result was having a hard time beating her one level below the maximum (which I believe is 8) and feeling a burning need to post this. to max the save file, I fought the same ghoul over and over again until it dropped a vampire dust, making a mistake here and there, losing a total of 3 vampire dust before the fight. overall, I just want to say that the fight's balancing is a huge issue for new players not expecting the difficulty of the fight, and the fact that you played the whole game beginning to end to address issues like this is extremely admirable. I wish you have a great time developing this game moving forward.

 "powerful treasure?" hoping to get the skeleton lexicon! can't wait to see what's coming either way though.