Some good advice! And I dig your writing style. I should amend however that experts are still mixed on whether the healing is down to the lettuce, or the extra-special preservatives that keep the hamburgers perfectly..."fresh" while stored in an abandoned alleyway crate for over a decade. Yum!
i do wish though that the fight with the 5 hyenas was a bit more in your favor though. I've beaten it before so obviously it's not impossible but man it is nearly impossible without the burger or any health items. There really needs to be like one more healing item or a greater chance the enemy misses during that fight cause right now it feels just soooo dependent on either rng or having a healing item. and if i'm being honest, the combat isn't why i'm here. I mean i like the combat a lot and i love when adult games aren't just long visuals novels with little interaction, but having to reload a save for the 7th time to finish one fight is awkward when it's a porn game and my pants are halfway off. That being said the writing and art is why i keep coming back because this is truly some of the best writing i've encountered in an adult game in a while. please keep up the good work.
Difficulty is a balance that is never going to be right for everyone. GT is explicitly not a visual novel: it does expect a little effort from the player to progress. But as RPGs go, this isn't a particularly hard one for the average player. I hate to be difficult, but for most people that are having issues, it's not even a problem of RNG, they just aren't playing smartly. If you don't manage your items properly, you're going to have a bad time. If you go into fights, especially big ones, without being topped off in health and energy, you're going to have a bad time. If you don't time your special attack, regular attack, and full heal actions appropriately to maximize what they can do, you're going to have a bad time.
Keep in mind that one of my main metrics for all of this is myself: I am NOT a skilled RPG player, by any stretch of the imagination. As soon as the mechanics of a game start to resemble tax preparation my eyes glaze over. If I can manage to play through GT, you should be able to as well.
But with all that said, eventually there will be an alternate route through the Host Club, specifically for those who would rather not take on the final gauntlet.
i should probably clarify a bit more, specifically the fight with 5 hyenas before you even get the disc, if you have used the hamburger already and saved (which i did on my first run cause i had some bad luck in the very first hyena encounter) that fight becomes much more difficult and dependent on hyenas dying fast enough with hard knocks (since at least in my expirence the base attack is too slow for that fight that early on) or the hyenas missing. It's not really a tough fight per-se it's just easy to accidentally make it a much harder fight. and once you realize about the item management part there's no way to go back without starting an entirely new file and then replaying the first section again. It's not the end of the world of course but it's certainly stinks to get stuck in the part of the game before anything sexy happens and have to start a new file be the best solution.
Ah pardon then, I thought you were talking about the fights near the end. Yeah, saving with the wrong timing could give you trouble there, but only if you're not rotating saves, which is pretty much standard practice for any challenging and unpredictable game. If you didn't have a save right at the beginning of the Barrens, you should have at least had one in Haven as you were preparing to leave, which is only a few minutes difference. If you were playing the whole game on one save...well, now you've learned your lesson. And really, GT is a lot less punishing on that front than a lot of games.
thinking about this again cause my friend is playing through it now (he loves it btw) and he ran into the same issue with the first 5 hyena fight you encounter where he had trouble beating it and actually asked me if it was supposed to be beatable lol. I think maybe if you gave people a burger and dazzle blast right before the fight it might help since most people are gonna use early items probably a bit faster. It makes it more clear the items are gonna be needed for that fight and as a lil backup so players don't accidentally softlock themselves at the start until rng goes in their favor. Plus if someone gets there and still has the first burger and blast it's a lil bonus that will make the fight easier for players who played well.
Glad to hear you passed on the word despite the issues you had with the game (And that he enjoyed it!). That said, I still have no plans to chance the items going into that battle. If you collect everything in Haven before heading out, you go into that fight with 2 hamburgers, 3 surume, and a dazzle blast. IE, 2 full heals, 3 partial heals, and an item that refills your energy AND keeps it from draining for several turns. If I was asking people to do that fight with no items, or less items, I'd agree it's a pretty hard fight to start the game on. But with those items it shouldn't be an issue. You just have to use them smartly. That said, we are now at two people who have had an issue with it, so noted. If there are enough complaints I'll be forced to reconsider, but for now most people haven't seemed to have any issues with that fight, even as an annoyance.