There's already a lot of interactions between skills, jab/flurry/jump-kick has solid synergy where you jab every time it overflows then unleash a devastating flurry, and jump-kick feeds you more blues to use on them.
Doggedly going for yellows to fill up kidney blow then one-shotting your opponent when you use it, Rage to neutralize the opponent's red skills and make skulls useful as matches, etc.
There's already a lot of of tactical options and you're at the scripted fight with the wraith in elsewhere storywise. Expect it to open up a lot more as the other trainer paths get unlocked and repeatable fights start happening.
The problems are not the synergies, but the time it takes to fill them up, considering the next drops are unpredictable, any kind of tactics is impossible, as there's no telling what the next drops at the tops will be.
On a normal match3, it's fine, but since we're sharing the board with an enemy, it's purely luck based, and you get even less choice as to which pieces will drop where, as any good move, will be consumed by the other one at the next turn.
The adversary, several times, got combos of 4 and 5's, as did I from time to time, but it had nothing to do with strategy.
In the poker, if you were so inclined, you could actually try to predict/block the adversaries, but in a shared match3 board, that is simply impossible, short of consuming the colors the other would need constantly.
Ideally, to fill a 15, you'll need at the very least, 3 turns of 5 identical colors. But, with the enemy, you're already at 6 turns. Now add the randomness to it, it simply takes way too long to fill the skills to use them, which in turn, makes the fight extremely boring. Do not get me wrong, I love the concept like in LOM, of having a proper minigame instead of fights with dodge and the like, but the pace of it, is just completely off, especially here where we're supposedly fighting MMA style hand to hand.
Short term, sure, it's fun. Long term? People will get bored of it extremely quickly.
That's actually a last minute change to (I assume) make sure people had a chance at seeing the side content for the first release, and because of that it does feel rushed. You get a bunch of the lead-up conversations to it after it happens. Lin tells you she tries to put a leash on you which makes no sense until you get texts from her later trying to invite you to company events to show off, and MC refusing. I'd like to see the progression go back to how it was for act2, when there's more game time for it to play out in. Some of the optional content does feel a bit disjointed because of that, Katie sends you nudes out-of-sequence that originally were a reaction to kelly turning out to be a stalker. With more game-time for the stories to develop they should feel more natural.
I noticed things happened weirdly as well, but I really was talking about the actual text progression for that specific event. You only speak to her twice I think; including the shower scene. And a couple of messages and pictures. I mean, sure it's a game, but... it just feels way too fast on the interactions between them to progress that far and that quickly.
Master/sub is not something that should happen this quickly, with so little efforts or communication. It just feels, wrong.
I mean, when seducing someone, the chase is the fun part. Getting your dick sucked or getting laid is just the reward, but the hunt is the actual fun part.
The guessing is a good point, and it might help that for an important storyline to have a quest entry associated with it. Something like a quest text of: "I need to get ready for the fight, I should get my stats all up to at least 10 before weigh-in" to let players know what's expected of them? Failing isn't the end of the game though, it's only an XP reward for beating the stat check.
I'm surprised it felt grindy, having playtested a bunch of times I appreciated that there were unique scenes for nearly everything I needed to do. What did you feel you had to do too many times? It might help to highlight that there's multiple ways to increase each stat so you don't feel that you're stuck in a rut.
This was an issue I fed back on LOM early on, in LOM, many events were random/scripted, and it seemed like we had a lot more "freetime" as well, so you had quite a fair bit of time to raise your stats high enough not to fail even with no indication, but there, everything is so fast timewise, with so little freetime to raise your stats, that it is pretty difficult to make it on time.
The first time, the game did not feel grindy, because I changed the activities and as such, spread my stats blindly. Then, encounters happened, and since I had no indications on that targets, there's no telling how much I was off by either.
On the 2nd try, I focused mostly on charisma at first, until the encounter (sadly, there were no scenes for them either :-( ).
It's not so much grinding, since the chapter is rather short, but redoing the same stuff (training/running/eating) blindly, because there's no indication on which events happens after what, or how many of X actions.
In the last game, I kept drinking from the cute snow one, and nothing happened for eons. Then all of a sudden, she had 3 posts, and a facial. I literally have no idea what triggers what at this point
