Thanks for giving it a play!
Yeah, Kytt wants to do full animations for the transformation sequences, she's going to start working on that once her hand heals from surgery.
I agree on the fights. I'd intended to customise each kind of mech for a particular role and balance the stats, but I ran out of time before I could.
Already planning on doing outlines for when you're behind foreground objects so you can see where things are (though I might just take the foreground layer out entirely, as it doesn't have the same effect as it did when I thought of it, and I may in fact redesign that entire scene and do a proper city map you can explore rather than a "hallway")
There is actually a very good reason for all that stuff happening, but the cutscenes which explain it are later than the bugs that break the game, so nobody's seen them yet and it probably seems like a lot of coincidence. Hopefully you'll play the update and you'll be able to get the payoff for that. I agree with you on the lighting, I fired all that in really rapidly near submission time and I didn't get to do as much with the scene as I wanted. I'll be revising that for the next version.
Yeah, *none* of the girls work. I tested the scenes individually but not as part of the whole game (didn't have time because I had to go to bed earlier so I could drive my wife for her surgery appointment) and Tigerlily's scene was done in about a minute in a frenzy just before I submitted, so I didn't notice the passability bug that soft locks it. These issues will all be fixed in the update.
Synchronise was a last-minute thing. Initially my reason for using BTB was the fusions, but I didn't realise you can't do fusions with abilities from different characters, and it was a dual tech/triple tech system I wanted. I figured out a way to do them, but I didn't want the player to just spam combo attacks so I put that in there so that you'd have to use Brave and queue up Synchronise along with the elemental ability. The only one that actually works in the current game is Volcano, though. I'm redesigning this entirely; not using the BTB system any more, the elemental attacks have a TP cost, and combos only require you to be using the elemental abilities in the same turn. Synchronise is gone completely, and the girls will also have a unique mechanic each to fill in the turns you can't use their elements.
Covered the Bravely Default issue above.
I've already set the intitial levels for the girls to 5, as CruelGamer made the same point. I didn't think of this at the time, as Jane's line was just a throwaway joke and I didn't think through the implications of it, but you're both absolutely right; the team has been active for a while, and starting at level 1 makes no sense.
Had I been able to properly balance the system, Ancient Automaton would have been a lot harder and the mechs would have been a mixture of easy and challenging. Hopefully once I do that balance pass it'll feel more like the former is a serious threat. As for them quitting after one problem, I had tried to hint with Tigerlily's dialogue that she's been getting disillusioned with the whole thing for a while (she's usually pretty standoffish but she's being particularly mean to Louise, I may have to crank that up a bit), and Louise's "failure" was just one thing too much for her. Tauria's reaction was definitely forced because I needed to get the scene over with, but when I go back to designing the end of the scene I'll either add more dialogue or just fade it out on Louise stammering and then do the newspapers, so you know the Zodia Girls disappeared but don't know exactly why.
The exact nature of Louise's inability to do their quad attack is a major plot point that will come up again later.