I'm going to change some things about the enemy maps and objects but I've been focusing on other things first.
I figure since I have more time today I'll try to concisely describe what felt "right" and "wrong" about how areas were done, and try to guess overall player perception as I try to hand you feedback for what went wrong with the swamp area in player perception.
To say the swamp is "mazelike" isn't really good feedback since the point of designing areas in a 2D RPG is that they're not linear or pointlessly open and barren to the degree it feels like walking in a desert containing nothing. In that respect while players will say the swamp "feels like a maze", the swamp feels like a particularly grueling and unrewarding maze instead of a fun one.
What "good" mazes are there? The first maze players will find is the mine, then the entry forest is yet another good maze. The dark woods opens up wider into something more of a field for exploration and battle but the travel channels are still there.
So what makes the swamp feel bad? For a start, the additional constraint of slowing movement across much of the swamp's area makes it feel slower to walk through. Since the objective is to find specific plants and kill them to kill their vines blocking paths, the slower travel speed in an area designed to involve a lot of searching and travelling feels bad for players who neglect to get or simply refuse to equip the boots that facilitate movement on harsh terrain.
Yet I could forgive that and many other gaming vets can. So what makes the swamp feel lame to veteran players of games? The lack of purpose to return. Earlier I expressed with another player that blue and red herbs are more commonly found than purple herbs because purple herbs were in a small patch of easily-ignorable grass instead of in a wider more general area. Now that you moved purple herbs from a small patch to this general area, the swamp has
some purpose, but it still feels lacking; entry forest had weretigers to fight for the right to transform into one or tame one, along with herbs, a range of flower colors for dye, some other player-transforming enemies, and most importantly the feeling that there is something significant to be found around the corner, like the entire beehive area or that one hidden witch tent in the entry forest. Maybe even a passage for the rare elemental gems or something wholly new like a unique piece of clothing or weapon not obtainable anywhere else. Maybe something like finding Muruti in the dark woods, an entire town with a unique merchant, etc.
Well, in the swamp, there's nothing fun yet. Players get attacked by RPGM generic enemy sprites with little promise for something uniquely fun. Attacked by frogs, fish, then later mudmen (a generic zombie design), snakes, etc. Players play a game with sex content to both see sexy enemies and collect ingredients to cause sexy outcomes, and the swamp has little of that. The fruit are dangerous and cause paralysis so it's not necessarily good for harvesting either (though for the sake of balance that's okay), and at this current point the swamp merely feels like a gap between town #2 and its quest in a cave beyond the swamp.
The cave seems to have useful water ingredient, and
maybe I missed something in the cave that
looked like fun, but I don't remember much fun in the cave. Most players probably give up playing the game somewhere in the swamp because it is a long span of target-hunting to remove barriers that disorients players and makes them quit the game if they were not adequately prepared (movement boots). The reason why a player would come to this forum and say "I'm asking if the swamp is complete or not" is because the swamp felt so boring they would rather not play more of it and find the answer themselves. A subtle hint that something unfun is happening in your game is when players ask questions about "X" at "Y" point in your game, because gameplay just before or during point "Y" is such a slog that their mind is already drifting away from the game and they'd rather ask for an answer to escape thinking through a lack of interest in the game than they would motivate themselves to play longer and figure out the answer themselves. It's that phenomenon where a really entertaining game can motivate even careless or lazy players to suddenly get really creative and smart about trying all their options and compiling their research, as if the game's fun and thrill motivates them to try harder / longer and learn more. When the opposite happens, an odd wall of careless questions appears. A kind of brain drain where the players are not thinking because
they would rather not. The tendency of players to not think depends on how little thinking the game required at baseline, but a careless audience is a hint that the audience isn't having fun. However it is really hard to know if the answer is easy to discover or not as the developer who made the game, because the dev knows everything about their game and sometimes the answer really is so difficult to find as a normal player who just walked into the game.
In short, the swamp does not contain fun content or have purpose in enabling fun content. The entire game is a collection of mazes but a slow-travelling maze (swamp) fatigues players. There are not major prizes to motivate players so they don't get invigorated enough to play through the full length of a perceptibly longer area, making the swamp a place were player interest dwindles as they hope the game has cool fun stuff beyond this area that feels long and lacks it.
