Just checking, "If you can't beat'em..." is impossible to get at the moment, correct? The positioning in the gallery makes me think it would be a Cecily scene but I have done everything I could think of and it hasn't unlocked yet.
Also, the new Evette scenes don't seem to be unlocking in the gallery, even after I got them.
Edit: The "intrusive tentacles" scene doesn't address the possibility that Collete could be a futa during it.
Edit2: If a player doesn't have enough different card types when attempting to utilize visualization, the player becomes stuck, unable to choose a second card, and needs to load an earlier save.
It is a Cecily scene, but it's not quite in the current version yet. The inquisitor scene with the tentacle scene shouldn't be accessible at all if you have Cecily as an advisor, so that's a bug. And as for not having enough cards, there actually is a button that says "Skip" that lets you skip picking the second card to combine and just remove the first card, although it is pretty easy to miss and badly placed.
I hear you and I really don't want to belabor the point.
But the truth is that the game should appeal to the player. The player should have some kind of control to achieve the outcome that they want. To argue otherwise is some kind of false dichotomy. "If you change this, it's not the same game". I really disagree.
A few things here. The player does have lots of control. You have control over the Princess's stats, you have over what colors are added to the Princess's deck and what cards are removed, you have control over who her trainer is, etc.
The game is about advising the Princess and seeing what she does and what happens to her. It's like raising a child, you can do your best to direct them and nurture them, but in the end what they do is their decision. In real life you can't start over to try to get them to different choices though
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In early development there was a version of the game where you chose what cards the Princess played, which did have a lot of advantages. But ultimately I changed it to how it works now because it didn't achieve my design goals. It's actually quite nice people enjoy the game as is, since it's missing what essentially the point of the entire system, which is the differing paths the Princess might take and the consequences of them.
The game does ask you to meet it on it's own terms or have pretty bad results, and is that a design flaw? Possibly, but that's not exactly uncommon in game design. Cover based shooters usually don't support the play style of running directly towards the enemy guns blazing, regardless of how much the player might want to do that. That does raise barrier to entry, but to be honest, I don't care all that much. My goal is to create the experience and themes I've had envisioned from the start, not to please the widest player base possible.
So the card system isn't changing because it fits my design goals very well. If you have another system that simulates the Princess making her own decisions, is influenced by her conversations with the PC, and is easy to understand why the results happen, you can pitch it if you want. Probably too much work to retrofit to whatever that is though. If your main argument is "the Princess's decisions shouldn't be partially randomized because it removes player agency" than you're never going to sway me because that's the entire point.
