As someone who usually avoids male-MC games, paticularly if they are bland 'bash&bang to glory and a bunch of girls', this game is a strong exception, absolutely loving the characters and humor (ashley's sass is divine), and the art is also nice.
For feedback, it feels odd that some stats such as vitality and agility read as only contributing an effect when equal to player level, while others give a small value each rank.
I get that its due to stuff like % mitigation being more powerful the more you have / having a flat limit of 100 so it cant match scaling like how the base damage from str does with increasing enemy health, but having say, a ratio where vitality equal to half player level would give half the mitigation of it being equal to player level, might work to give it value aside from being a primary stat.
So both 10vit 10level and 100vit 100 level would give the 30% mitigation, but 5vit 10 level and 70vit 140 level would give 15% mitigation, and 10vit 30 level might give 10% mitigation.
Unless it already works like that, and it might given I'm mostly going off the tooltips.
Could also have a 'minimum' % based on investment, so say, 10/20/40/80 points means you get at least 5/10/15/20% mitigation no matter your level.
idea of that is to avoid the negative feedback of your points in vitality/agility actually being less useful each time you level up without spending a 'tax' to keep them at the same value.
Damage feedback was covered, and it'd be handy to be able to mouse over status effects on enemies to see what they do, sometimes it wont work in adventure fights although it does work fine in camp sparring.
Healing spells can also feel a bit weak, it always seems like the hp restored is less than the damage taken by spending the turn to cast them (when against threatening/equal opponents), and cant use them to patch up after the fight is over, even 1 'empty' round after a win to spend a heal would be handy. (tho i guess that's balance related given how useful it would be and the rest/healing flask choices when adventuring).
There's also cases during sparring where once a companion gets low, they focus on healing rather than attacking, so even if one hit would finish me, they'll just try to recover endlessly as i steadily out-damage their healing rate for an easy win.
Apologies, I missed this post in my previous response.
I'm glad you're enjoying the game! That exact problem is what I was hoping to avoid, I always get annoyed when a game forces me to play a MC/insert that I don't like and the girls have no personality, so I wanted to try something different. Making the MC a partial insert was probably a mistake on my end, but eh, live and learn.
Vitality and Agility actually do already work on that ratio, idk how well it's communicated ingame. But if you're at level 10 with 5 vit, you get 15% mitigation (half of the 30% you'd get at 10 vit). Originally they just gave a flat 0.4% mitigation, but were completely worthless earlygame as a result, this system was an attempt to fix that.
Mousing over statuses runs into a Renpy issue where those tooltips don't work if you can't make a choice (I think), ex. they always work while you're selecting a move but not between turns. I have no idea how to fix that or if it can be fixed, but I'll try.
Healing magic is... admittedly in a tough-to-fix spot. If you're running tanky build, they can HILARIOUSLY outpace incoming damage and make you impossible to kill - I run a shield build with Sarah, and I don't even take damage. Making heal spells usable during rests or after battle makes sense at least, since they 'waste' mana. I think I could do that. I can also make them scale a little better, but unlike normal abilities they don't have to deal with defense/res/mitigation so they can be deceptively strong.
One thing I'd like to explore is making *some* heal magic instant cast as well, or more regen options, so you'd only 'waste' a turn on heals if you needed a big one - but I'm hesitant to fuck up the action economy too much lol. So please bear with me as I try to carefully fix it.
On the companion thing... honestly, related to the last subject; I could make heals stronger, but more of them have cooldown. So you aren't stuck chain-healing, and neither is your sparring partner, but using a heal feels better. IDK.
