OK, I'm just going to say this: this game's combat system is absolutely terrible, the single worst thing about it, and seriously harms the entire game's appeal by being appallingly unfun, frustrating and annoying.
There's three big problems with the combat system in this game that make it possibly the worst I've ever come across in an ero-RPG. And the worst thing is, all three are very clearly deliberate, conscious decisions by the developer, that could be very easily fixed except that apparently the developer thought they were good ideas, instead of terrible ones.
1. Krowly is an absolutely terrible fighter.
Yeah, he's a warlock not a warrior, it's part of the point of the game. But that's no excuse for forcing you to play with possibly the wimpiest protagonist I've ever been forced to put up with in an RPG. He's made of damp tissue paper and rapidly gets the crap kicked out of him by all but the weakest monsters. You can't heal effectively in combat as healing potions restore less HP than you'd take from a single hit, and as far I've discovered so far there's almost no equipment to make you less-useless (if there is some that can be found later it's coming in FAR too late). You're entirely dependent on magic to fight, which makes sense because, again, you're a warlock, but magic is just TERRIBLE, namely because of the utterly pointless baked-in miss chance that starts at 10% for basic spells (but sure as hell seems to miss a lot more than 1/10 times) up to a simply ASININE 30% failure chance for second tier spells. There's no reason whatsoever for magic to regularly fail except to make the already-frustrating combat system randomly fuck you over more for lulz. Krowly is almost completely ineffective unless he's accompanied by Eric or Jaina & Rose (which can only happen under specific circumstances), giving you a strong incentive to avoid combat at all costs. Speaking of which:
2. Combat is almost entirely unrewarding.
The developer made a conscious decision that combat doesn't give you any exp to level up with, instead only letting you gain it through quest rewards or through daily tasks like adventuring with Eric or studying. OK; why? This isn't one of those RPGs where your progression through the story is gated by your level, which would give you a reason to give exp as a reward for completing quests, the only thing your level affects is your combat ability. Which I guess does gate your progression through the story, but less in the sense "you aren't up to this part of the story yet" and more "you can do this whenever you like, but you get the crap kicked out of you if you try", which is just frustrating. Even worse, exp requirement scaling is still the same as in any other RPGmaker game with normal exp systems, meaning you can finish a day's adventure with Eric and gain 5 exp- oh boy, only 95 more to go! So instead of grinding enemies, you're grinding quests while the enemies you often have to fight anyway are mostly a waste of time. There is NO good reason why enemies shouldn't give exp as normal- all you get from them is junk drops and the occasional usable material, which really isn't worth it most of the time because there's easier ways of getting money. So unless you have to fight an enemy for a story reason or you want to beat them to fuck them (or lose to them to be fucked by them), you have almost no reason to want to fight enemies whenever you can avoid it instead. Unfortunately:
3. Enemies are intensely aggressive.
Unlike in most RPGmaker games where enemies are visible on the map rather than random encounters, enemies don't roam around randomly, or even head towards you when you get too close- as soon as you're on the same screen as them they head directly towards you to engage you even from long distance, forcing you to dodge for your life if you want to avoid getting sucked into another unrewarding combat encounter. In enclosed spaces like the goblin caves, avoiding them is literally impossible.
So what we have is a game where combat is unreasonably hard, combat is intensely unrewarding to the extent that you want to avoid it at as much as possible, and the game is going out of its way to force you into combat as much as possible.
The single biggest reason I no longer play this game as much as I did before was because the combat was just too frustrating. Honestly, I think just adding exp rewards to combat would go a long way towards fixing the issue, because the difficulty of the combat would be balanced out by the fact that I'm getting stronger with each win (the very basis of the RPG genre) and the enemy aggression would be less frustrating if I had a reason to want to fight. But I'd quite like it if my magic-focused character was actually, y'know, competent at magic as well (in almost every other RPG magic is defined by being UNABLE to miss) and the choice of whether or not to fight could be left up to me in case I don't really feel like it at the moment and just want to explore the environment. But, as I said, these were all deliberate decisions made by the developer, so regardless of everything I've just said I'm sure the response is just going to be the usual "it's not a bug it's a feature". I just had to get all this off my chest anyway, because it pisses me off every time I play the game.
