thanks for the report!
It was much needed with so many of these projects disappearing this year. I thought this one was secretly shut down too.
My computer also is in need of an upgrade with newer games burning the older parts lol. Hopefully theres a sale soon, im still waiting for october and black friday sales myself.
The hotfixes seems to have patched out most of the game breaking bugs so far. The game seems to be in a decently playable state.
The starting gems have given me 12/14 of the characters average so far, and the rest of the gem giving systems gets me the 13th. Though I still haven't managed to get the ninja girl again.
From the ones I do get to play with, Izumi is still OP lol. I always jump straight to the raid boss to see if I can take him down, he dosen't kill himself anymore but Izumi can still stunlock him for the entire fight. Percentage based skills such as Rin's ultimate also burns the boss pretty quick so just those two alone can beat him in a couple rounds fresh at level 1, well if the boss dosen't murk them from the start anyway XD.
Not sure what direction you want to take the stun skill, but I kind of liked the confuse before. It should just give a chance to attack ally or foe instead of just hitting themselves. With it being a stun though, maybe there should be a percentage chance it succeeds, a longer cooldown/shorter stun time, or a diminishing return for consecutive stuns. Usually games just makes bosses immune but i kind of like being able to give them debuffs, maybe he just needs support monsters.
With Yuka and Izumi, 2 enemies are pretty much out for an entire fight. That being said, the missions with 3-5 enemies gave me trouble with this cheesy strategy and I had to start properly buffing them up.
The rest of the missions seem to be in a good state, the easy ones live long enough to see all the character skills at lvl 1 and the normal and hard difficulties can need a bit of strategy if on equal power. The healing goblins especially made me think about target priority when I was still relying on stun cheese. Though I'd say the more sturdy enemies feel too sturdy even when defense debuffs are applied on them. This made bleed and burn skills seem more useful then atk buffs and defense debuffs at times.
Now for some bugs I ran along the way. That double drop rate bug has shown multiple times but I can't quite pin down what causes it. I thought it was due to a character death, a kill by dot damage, or a certain lineup of characters. I've gotten it to show up with any of those conditions but have also failed to replicate the bug with the same conditions. All I can say is my starting lineup straight to fighting the raid boss is usually
Arino Izumi
Akamine Rin
Takayama Yuka
and Nakada Yoko
something about these characters kept showing double drops. Maybe it has to do with how many turns/rounds have passed because once my girls started getting equipment and levels 5-7, It was getting harder to reproduce the bug and then it kind of stopped all together when the boss started dying around the time ultimate skills are fired.
For a bug I can confirm, Nakata Ima's speed decrease skill has had some weird effects when fighting the raid boss. Seems any change of character has varying effects, but overall the turn order ends up skipping my party's turn instead of slowing down the boss. Can characters really gain more then one turn with enough speed? I think this buggy skill just made me think so lol.
Another thing I've noticed are high HP party members can take above 100 damage and they're hp bar does not seem to update. It does seem to update though when their HP seems to get really low.
Then with the affection system, the exp is usually really close to the next level up right after the previous level up. I'm not sure if this is intended or just a visual bug because at times leveling from 0 to 1 seems longer then leveling up from 1 to 2. This isn't much of an issue for now because the lower need to level up has made testing easier.
That's all for now.
So eh, about that affection level. I was building up another overall feedback report, but the affection system was being really weird.
I wanted to see if Hiranobu Amariko wasn't possessed anymore so I crafted some apples. I could see a gain from even just 1 item now, although there still isn't much of a visual at the very start. But the important part is once I gave enough to level up the game just softlocked. After testing several characters, this happened with a few others.
Besides Amariko there was
Arino Izumi
Hoshimeki Akima
and Senri Utsuki
They all softlocked on the first affection level up and it did the weirdest thing. My computer has 2 monitors and when the softlock happened, the game would switch to my second one when restarted from the softlock. I could then give an item to get the affection level up properly but this happened for each listed character while the rest did not have this problem. I was getting the game to switch between monitors to see if it had anything to do with the softlock, but it seemed to happen on both, and the sucessfull level up also happened on both, but each softlock always switched the game to my secondary monitor after a reset.
I think in one really weird instance after Izumi's softlock, I was grinding the raid boss for more gold to makes apples but when I cleared the mission, the reward drop was double and there was also 2 of each character gaining exp. It didn't look like a visual glitch either, because It showed Rin at two different levels. Maybe it was reading the old save data? I coulden't get this bug to happen again.
After testing all characters for the softlock I tried to reset the game to confirm if the same characters would give the bug, except the erase progress button didn't do anything because it looks like the game is saving differently. I'd see the old save data would be cleared but my current progress was still the same. However it seems the game really is reading a few things from the old save data because loading up an old save backup would still change the character selection during the mission screen to who I had in the party during the time.
I'm not really tech savy enough to figure out where and how the new save system works so that's about all I can test. Though this is why I think an in-game cheat menu for now would be useful for testing lol
A few final notes from this experience.
Its probably not that important but a graphics setting menu would be appreciated for people like me with more then one monitor. I manged to find a workaround to get the game to move back but yea.
The crafting system could use a multiple crafting button so making a bunch of apples and things isn't as tedious, also theres a visual bug where the material count does not update when an item is crafted.
The character selection screen still needs the ability to move party members around instead of removing the entire party and selecting each character again.
If possible a predicted affection and even normal exp gain would be convenient when giving gifts and level up books.
And finally, I can confirm Amariko isn't possessed anymore :3
So which update do you have planned for there to be a gameplay loop?
I too had to figure out how the saves worked to get alot of crystals for the gacha, the latest update gives a fair amount now but I think it took me 1000 x10 rolls to get the 5 star character before the update. I'm not sure if the update changed the 5 star rate but that is quite alot for playing normally.
The new gift system also requires too much for the materials and gold we get per fight. It took quite a few fights to craft one gift item but then the affection didn't even seem to go up. Was the affection just so low that the bar didn't move? Because I see it does go up if you give alot of gifts at once, though I had to cheat again to get enough gifts for this lol. The gift system needs an explanation.
The gold and material gain overall feels way lower then previous versions, I remember being able to collect materials for the services legitimately but I had to cheat for them all this time around. If it was changed like this for future balancing purposes, then we need a cheat menu for testing for now. Something like the jinxed CMD in your slice of life project that gives out money could also work. (btw, the rates are even more absurd in that one that I still have yet to confirm if legendary cards exist >_>)
You could also add a gift gacha to make affection a bit easier to increase or some affection gain for succesfull battles. But for now the affection increase is just so low that it is hard to test it through normal gameplay, and then theres the bug where even if someone had the patience to grind for all those gifts normally, the costumes don't even save as mentioned by someone else.
Thankfully the interactions do save and they are quite cute. I see alot of effort goes here since each girl gets a unique animation. I just wish there was more special interactions like the level 10 instead of just skirt lift and then increased skirt lift in the lower affection levels. Where is my headpats and face pokes >:3
Some of the blush reactions could use a bit lighter colors, some of them are so dark they look a bit... sick? And then Hiranobu Amariko is a special case... why does her eyes roll back like shes possessed O_O
The summer costumes are quite a treat, even Nakada Yoko gets one for being the lowest rarity so hopefully theres one for everyone later :D
Overall really nice feature though we still need some sort of gameplay loop to have fun and test things without cheating lol.
For the normal gameplay itself, the battle system seems to be coming together now where before it was so jank and softlocked everywhere that I barley touched it. It still does sometimes, a few of the situations have been addressed already but recently I had a random softlock with an axe goblins turn after a different enemy killed one of my characters. Then on the opposite end Arashi Lilith softlocked the fight after killing an enemy with her ultimate. Not really sure if it was the kill or just the skill though because charging to the ultimate skill seems to take longer then the previous updates so its hard to get to them before the fight ends.
Then when it came to the harder fights to have enemies that lasted long enough for the ultimate skills, I had to cheat some more so my characters wouldn't die instead. there dosen't seem to be any exp gain in battle and crafting books takes alot of effort for barley any exp. The basic leveling system still needs some adjusting.
Something I noticed, there seems to be a speed mechanic where some characters can get more turns before others instead of being a fixed round. It would be cool to have a wait command to set up combos or plan damage mitigation too. Though it could also end up making it too easy to cheese the skill cooldown? Though that could also just be a strategic decision to sacrifice a turn to get the ultimate skill faster since they can take so long to charge. I've mostly just seen the 2nd skill so far even with the few extra turns.
Speaking of, Arino Izumi and Takayam Yuka is so OP with their 2nd attack that it makes the first raid boss kill himself lol, not sure if intended but it was fun seeing a high attack enemy being its own weakness.
There was definetly a few things to have fun with the battles this time around but it still needs some things to have a fun gameplay loop. Looking forward to how they play out later. But also what the battle system really needs is explosive clothing damage when your girls take heavy hits :3
