I think sportsfan30 had the right idea with adjusting difficulty for games like this. The things making it too easy are that you have infinite money, tons of helpful item drops, and most fights are easily avoidable. Tuning difficulty to make individual fights harder to win is a worse way to do it than making attrition more noticeable and unavoidable. It undermines the premise otherwise: strong heroine degraded by weaklings. Reducing the supply of items and money/carry limits on purchasables, making dropped/found items come with drawbacks or have a more limited scope of effects (can only find HP potions that are tainted, no repair kits, neutralisers, or purification items), and increasing the chase speed of ambushing enemies so you can't just avoid them all contribute more to both the theme and making gameplay challenging. That's my plan at least for once the translation is done to create a difficulty mod.
I know when I'm trying to do a scuffed run, that's usually more impactful than any stat debuffs I give her. No healing items allowed, use Repair Kits only when clothes are completely destroyed, not purging Aphrodisiac unless it is at max, deliberately letting ambushes actually connect, etc.
One thing I think would be interesting to try would also be adding more unavoidable fights where you start at a disadvantage. For example, the Matango fight at the bottom of the swamp can usually be cleared out in a single Bladestorm, making it a non-issue, despite it being a nest you have fallen into. Starting ambushed, having additional hit chance penalties, additional waves of enemies, etc. would make the encounter far more interesting. That might be a little bit more challenging to add to the files, but it's something I'm thinking about as well. Same idea, but making more chokepoints where you have to fight an ambush.
Some things that I would enjoy in a hard mode would be.
1. Having some sort of barrier to the area boss room that needs items for the stage to allow progress. This forces you to seek out enemies for thier drops, or they could drop from chests instead of enemies, but enemies drop the keys to the chests. Or simplely needing to clear each map to progress through it, which could be tied to resting, if you rest the counter resets.
2. Bastes are not completely removed and are instead just treated each treatment will allow X number of "days" of exploring before they reactiveate before needing to be treated again. In addition each treatment can also have a tolerance build up that reduces the max "days"and eventaully becoming ineffective until you spend some days without treatment. "days" could be resting on the bed (would require force resting before you can leave again). Or X number ot steps in a day which would mean mid exploration your bastes could come back.
The 2 above changes would also go well with the suggestion earlier about miasma seeping into the normal areas.
3. Increased costs for consumables, lower drop rates, needing more repair items to fix clothes.
4. For the train area, forced end of transformation when around normal people. Which I want to say was the indtended function otherwise the baste from the gropers makes no sense after the first ride (no underwear)."curing" this one can be permanat but you need to either buy new ones, or find them later in the stage, instead of just having a infinte supply.
These are my pipe dream wants, butI'll be happy with anything that makes it more of a challenge.
But eitherway thanks for the work on translating it.
agreed, esp the waves for that matango fight. Might be hard to add it in randomly, but 4 normal matangos felt a bit weak. Maybe some "mutated" versions of normal enemies that can survive one or two more hits? Maybe more traps as well as ambushes. I remember one of the favorite parts of the first game was the haunted house. Route changes, trapped chests, challenging minigames, etc.
If anything though, killing all the non-ambush enemies is what makes it easy. You get so much money and items from them and then you can look around the map with no pressure after using all the items to max yourself again. The scuff things you talk about, I already was doing most of them because the game floods you with the ability to max yourself. Again, I think the dev did a good job adjusting it from last game.... esp with the purification item I noticed getting too often in the first game, seems to be a bit rarer now. I just wish there was some other sort of reward/currency dump mechanic for killing lots of enemies.
Oh, and it jsut came to mind, but what if you couldn't full heal hp and mp and estrus from home? what if it was just a bit of a hp/mp heal and bad effects had to be itemed. What if there was an in-game time system that affected various things? Like, there's flavor talk about the matango aphro fog seeping out into the real world, what if taking too long to kill them (let's say you kill boss and skipped them and moved on) would affect your "rest" at home? etc.
sportsfan30 as well since you already modded the previous game?
I think action/rpg ero-games where defeat is the main theme work best when they operate on the same conventions as survival-horror games. Supply scarcity & attrition, enemy ambushes (player awareness being the key thing), and creating emergent situations where it might be better for the player to try and run/sneak past enemies instead of fighting them.
That said, it's a fine line between being engaging and frustrating. Some of Doomeye and tyrrandae's ideas would be too far across it for my personal taste - mainly the whole thing of pretty much never being able to fully recover. Maybe this could be a resource/item sink - you convert them into a resource (cash would work, but it'd be a more interesting decision if it were a different resource) and spend it to recover stats/bastes that aren't from defeat.
I like the idea of enforcing exploration instead of just being able to rush straight to the boss. Multiple waves each increasing in number in the Mantango fight would also be appreciated, my initial reaction was "oh, that was it?" when you only have to fight what, 4 of them?
The clothing repair item only repairing 1 stage of damage at a time is a great idea, and yeah, less items in general. Maybe a carry limit on healing/restoration items, and/or they cost more the more you have in your inventory.
The concept of a random, slightly stronger version of a given enemy would also help make fights less predictable and auto-win.
I got some requests of my own- I'm not taking into account how realistic any of it is development wise, this is just what I'd like to see if there were no obstacle.
If you don't clear the Matango den in the first level, all enemies in subsequent levels could be purple stat-jacked versions - sprite edit not really necessary, and not desired in a few cases, though it'd work well with a couple specific enemies like the molestergeist.
I don't get why the naked state isn't accessible through normal gameplay, and that'd be another feature I'd really like to have added. Maybe if you're defeated X times in a row on a given level, or maybe certain enemy attacks/defeats could trigger it.
Edit: Looks like I was wrong on this one. Playing around with mtool, under vars there is "Transformation clothing damage" which increases by 1 with each attack taken. 400 is the breakpoint for naked. I didn't realize there were so many levels to the clothing destruction. 400 is a lot of attacks to take without the opportunity to repair them, and I doubt there's any circumstance you'd see that in normal gameplay - that's to say unless you're deliberately trying for it. Maybe some/all enemies could have their clothing damage per attack increased? The breakpoints could also be lowered. Not that I'm having an easy time finding any of these to edit in the game files.
Anyway, to take it further, having a side-quest to recover the clothes per level would be cool. They're just in some room off the "main" route like with the other baste treatments - you find them, are ambushed, fight the fight and must win to recover them. Maybe sometimes they could be cursed with the slime baste.
This, combined with reduced efficacy of the clothing repair item, would make that attrition more felt. Removing or reducing the efficacy of restorative abilities (catch breath, purify) to make the player more dependent on items would go a ways to dialling it up as well. Maybe enemies could steal items from you on defeat too.
I think the durability for untransformed clothes could be reduced a ton - right now it takes 70(?) attacks which I feel is a bit excessife. A meter for clothing durability wouldn't go amiss either. Maybe it wouldn't be a massive effort for the top/bottom to each be able to be completely removed, but it'd mean splitting the sprites
Also it appears there's no breakpoint for naked when untransformed (maybe you need to have had underwear stolen?), even though you can take them off in the gallery room.
It'd be nice if enemies from other levels would show up, though that might be wonky with defeat triggers and such. It'd also kinda break theming to a degree, so this could be a toggle, or maybe it doesn't apply to a given level until you've beaten it. Nevertheless it would be nice to be able to have battles with different enemy compositions.
The starfish enemy in particular only shows up in one area on one level. I think it'd work really well as a regular mob in the last level.
There do exist world sprites for the majority (if not all) of enemies - I haven't been able to tell what exactly determines which defeat scene you get if you lose to a mixed mob. But if it's pre-determined, and not based on the last enemy to have attacked you, it'd be great to use that mob's sprite to indicate as much. Or maybe it could simply be used to indicate mobs that consist entirely of that enemy type (which I feel there should be more of).
I'd love the ability to reset all a level's story, dialog and triggers without having to start a new game/NG+.
Different music would be great, less whimsical and more downbeat like the defeat scene music.
I'd really appreciate the option to remove or reduce obnoxious sound effects and flashes - the camera enemy is especially egregious.
I feel like energy drain should be taken away as a baste and just be a regular base mechanic, the whole thing of untransforming from being attacked is awesome. Maybe it could be replaced with a greater susceptibility to slimegirls' dirty talk.
Stealing a couple features from Exorcism Shrine Maiden:
If you start a battle with multiple mobs in adjacent tiles to you, or to each other, they all merge into one battle. Rather than more powerful enemies like ESM, it'd work better here if it were just more enemies.
As your clothes are degraded, enemies not othewise scripted to do so, gain a chance to start chasing you.
An enemy detection cone/field of view and sneaking system (basically, walk to reduce their detection range) would help make the world navigation more compelling, and make the mobs more distinct - different ones could have different detection cones and range.
Using the suicide capsule (can we please change its name? Suicide really aint something I want to think about when I'm trying to get my rocks off. "Sedative capsule" instead? Items.json, line 854 if anyone would like to change it for themselves) should be instant - enemies' actions can interrupt it at least as of 1.0.
