Hey thank you for writing the review. Despite it being very negative, I actually thought it was insightful and so I decided to try to answer, explain my design philosophy and also maybe some solutions to make it better. Since it is clear you tried the game out in good spirit, I am responding not to discredit your review, after all, your lack of enjoyment is completely my problem to solve as a developer.
Okay, first problem, this thoughtful and articulate response is extremely out of character for Aerisetta who would most likely just beat me up.
MandyF
I'll start off by admitting a problem which a lot of negative reviews stem from, the character called HERO is the only male character, most players are male and so they naturally gravitate towards using this player, but HERO is unfortunately the hardest character to use in the entire roster. There is a reason for this, this was originally a Femdom game where the males get dominated, and I intentionally made HERO be very slow, and have very long recovery from attacks. This made is highly likely for him to mess up and get dominated by the female characters. Perhaps I should make an easy to control male character to counter this problem or just label him as hard/advanced to use.
However, at the end of the day, this is a team game, not a 1 character game. Please see the movement options available in the video. As many other people pointed out, the controls and combat in this game is top notch for the beat em up genre, and i've had it reviewed by many long time beat em up players, and I've played and studied dozens of games in this genre before making mine. It's unfortunate, HERO's movement is actually considered very hard and innovative by experienced beat em up players but off set by huge 1 hit kills, but because of the nature of the adult game lens, people often only look at him as the baseline character and think this is how the game controls period.
The thing here is that the game seems like it's meant to be played as HERO, as he's pretty much the default and it seems like the entire game is centered around playing as him and getting dominated- I say this as a cis female that doesn't gravitate towards playing as male characters but is generally forced to in the overwhelming majority of erogames. The fact that the model of the guy getting dominated in every femtality is clearly supposed to be the hero (same hair, same build and so on) plays a role in it too, but ultimately the biggest part is that his name is literally "HERO". Being the hero is basically shorthand for being the protagonist, so regardless of what he looks like or what his gender is, he's going to be the one people go with. Also, of course, the game automatically starts you off as him, and when you face off against the bosses (other than the boss of the first level), their scenes can only be activated on the hero- when you're playing as a female character, their femtality move just sort of awkwardly knocks them down and deals one point of damage. It's clear the game
expects you to play as the hero in instances like those.
That plays into a bigger point with the way erotic stuff is handled in general- when you're playing as a female character and initiate dominating a fallen enemy, the perspective suddenly flips to that of the fallen enemy. You don't really experience the humiliation and sweet sting of defeat, because you didn't actually lose, but you also don't really experience the rush of dominance, because now you're suddenly seeing things through the perspective of some lackey and it's specifically put in the second person, telling you that
you're that lackey.
As far as the character switching, the game never really tells the player that at any point- it doesn't even tell them
how to do it or let them access the controls that show them. For that reason, I didn't play as any other character for ages- only when the hero died did I finally experience one of the others. There are problems with the character switching combo thing as well, mostly that it's pretty pointless in-game. Really, this applies to a lot of the crazy combos and stuff that the player is able to do if they spend enough time button mashing and learning what does what; it's ultimately less effective than just herding the enemies together and pressing the hit button over and over again until they die. There are a lot of neat tricks one can do but they're pretty redundant, and without access to a menu or controls, actually finding them would take a substantial amount of time and trial and error.
I think you're right in that the healing enemy is introduced way too early. I'll think about moving such enemies to later in the game or nerfing.
To me, it's less a matter of difficulty (I got through that area on my first try without any real trouble aside from the frustration) and more a matter of the player being given a directive they can't realistically accomplish with the information they've been given. The player is told to perform an ultimate but there isn't any way for them to find out how to do it aside from button mashing and hoping you find it before the enemies kill you. You mention the need for a tutorial, but honestly I don't even feel like you
need a tutorial- just the ability to access the controls during the game would immediately make the game far more playable.
This is pretty standard though, it came standard with the engine which was designed to make beat em ups. What did you expect it to be?
The escape key. Is that really the standard? I've never played another game where the pause button was "enter".
Oh yeah, and as far as the hitboxes go the problem I was having was not due to the width of them but their depth- that is to say, they were huge, but only on a very thin plane. You could be standing right next to them and not hit them at all, at least with the sword.
Also, while you're fielding pedantic complaints from random perverts, the fact that there are two different narrators bothers me, as does the completely nonlinear world map where you can just walk over the oceans and through mountains... and at the end of the first level, it starts playing one of the narrator's voice lines before the previous one stops, so both are playing at once and it's incomprehensible... I'll stop now.
thanks for your time and all your hard work!
