So yeah, actually. The megaslime portion of the progression is
objectively bad UX. Points against it, from a UX perspective:
- There is literally no indication in-game that the pearl exists until you find it.
- The pearl being accessible is locked behind an arbitrary event unrelated to the relevant progression. (Fucking the kraken, specifically)
- The only way to find out in-game that the pearl is relevant to the megaslime is to talk to her before taking her keystone, but after having managed to find the pearl. Literally just happenstance via opening up the relevant dialogue option.
- There is literally no indication in the game that taking the keystone from the slime will result in her never, ever talking to you again. (Don't give me BS about the messages on how she has it as a friend and really likes it - those come explicitly with the context that she was lonely, which have the implication that she'd be willing to talk to you even without the pearl or keystone because, again, lonely.)
- There is no way to undo the decision once you've made it, forcing you to discard a save with (assuming you didn't cheat), literal hours of work because you made a 100% blind choice.
This kind of progression is thirty years out of date. This is the kind of progression Nintendo used to sell NES games in the late 80s and early 90s, where being able to beat an arbitrarily difficult game gave you schoolyard bragging rights because the internet didn't exist in a way where it was relevant to spoiling this info.
And you know what it takes to fix this? Aside from the obvious "actually tell and show the player things" bit, all it takes is literally just adding the option to offer the pearl to the sad and sobbing megaslime after she wakes up. At that point it's still bad UX, but at least it's bad user experience that's in line with the rest of the game's progression instead of significantly worse.
