Bro...
Literally posted on Discord yesterday about how the writing at the end was my biggest regret when developing this game.
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To accuse me of "not giving a fuck about critical feedback" is perhaps the biggest fucking insult anyone on this site has ever given me.
You've been on this thread, seen me chatting so you've seen first hand how much crticism matters to me and how much I listen to it. The controversial ending sequence is entirely regrettable, so let me tell you how I'd write it now if I had the time and opportunity to just redo the entire thing.
1. Swiftstroke would be significantly weaker. She's not nearly important or relevant enough to get the screentime and growth I gave her.
2. Dante, Bessie and Ray would be significantly stronger and now major players in several aspects of the raid. I'd take advantage of his Calamity Overlook power boost to pit him against several of the Shadow Hunters.
3. I'd keep the focus and perspective on Dante, instead of playing out entire battles with the other characters. The other characters will only get snippets and updates of their situation.
4. "But why wasn't it already changed?" - Because this is an extremely long game, and the final mission was released all at once. It took a long time for the complaints to build up, and I
did make changes where I could to smooth out this issue from the criticism I'd received by that point. I looked at every single scene Swiftstroke appeared in and rewrote it to try to make her growth more natural. At this point, it's felt like it was too late, I made a mistake and there's no magical fix beyond rewriting 50,000 words of story - it'd feel even more wrong going back to the RPGMaker Engine which might be the single biggest thing preventing me from wanting to make any more changes to be honest. If this game was designed in Ren'Py I probably would have already changed the ending.
It's sad to me that 4% of the game, the very last mission, is enough to sour a previous fan into hating my game and hating its creator. I fucked up, and it's just that simple sometimes, and if you don't realize that then I don't think you realize just how hard writing can be. Consider this situation for a second, I made one small mistsake at the very end of my 500,000 word game and it was enough for you to drop my game from a "4/5 to a 2".
That is insane.