I feel there's great potential here, but at the same time some points could be vastly improved to make the game a more enjoyable experience. I'll list those that stood out the most to me, in no particular order of importance:
- A lingering feeling of lack of progression - the only change I've noticed from level 1 to 5 were bigger HP/MP pools; the character stats only seem to have improved with the change of equipment.
- A lack of variety of actions in-combat; I get this is a WIP game, but tied to the lack of the feeling of progression, it seems that right now there’s no way of getting extra skills whatsoever; coupled with no defensive options, this makes the combats very stale: and since the bulk of the game appears to be the dungeon delving + combat, we should have more options as a whole.
- Talk command still doesn’t work, I know, WIP…
- Sex attacks from the enemies feels way overloaded; it's jarring to see a level 5 Nia (with 150+ health pool) losing at least 1/5 of her HP bar because a 1st level Imp used a sex attack on her. If Celeste is hit, I’ve seen her lose 1/3 of her HP!
Charm / futa effects shouldn’t cause you to get dogpiled and stunlocked at the same time, unless you’re also able to use them against the monsters themselves, or reverse it somehow.
- Speaking of 1st level enemies, it’s really weird things like Green Slime having things like a restoration move that only cost 1 MP (!) to use; On my first levels / trips, I got a streak of bad luck and just kept on chipping an apparently immortal Green Slime, who just kept recovering herself while I couldn’t keep up with her healing.
- The party and enemies both have a front and back row, but enemies always seems to have some form of ignoring your rows – Celeste seems to have the same chance to be targeted as much as Nia, even though only her can directly hit the enemy backlines. This correlates directly with the feeling of overloaded of sex attacks, as explained above, since sex attacks / dogpiling ignores row anyways. Since range is being ignored, it should work both ways.
- Traps dealing direct % damage without any way of actually reducing them makes them feel cheaper than they should.
- Is there no way of getting out of the dungeon without backtracking?
And since I’m already critiquing, might as well do some U.I. suggestions.
- Back and Quit game on the same menu "slot" doesn't seem like an optimal choice - I myself have quitted the game a few times just using items or changing equipment, because I can't directly close the menu with the option without pressing back.
- A help menu (maybe a quest log, encyclopedia or whatever) in-game could be added to not only help with explanations about what each stats does, but also functions the “Control.txt” on the game package don’t tell, such as Q/W rotating the dungeon isometric view;
- A gallery feature (maybe tied to the help above) would make a great addition.
- Quest descriptions that require a number of items should tell how you much do you actually need to finish it. I've hit the fail message of "you don't have enough" when all I needed was one more ruby... which the game doesn't tell you how many in total you need.