Randomly worked up an urge to play only to discover that even John's been feminized now.

The characters are so painfully generic and homogenized under this new artist. John and Paul look borderline identical outside of swapped hair colours. Charlotte's character design feels like it lost all her character. 

I'm sorry, but they're just not good character portraits.  The old artist managed to capture their personalities in their designs, but also in their faces. Both the guys just look like major twinks now.

The poor quality of their portraits is also majorly clashing with how good Aura's has always been. They look like they're trying to imitate Aura's artstyle/quality, but feel like knockoffs. If they have the same artist as Aura, then I'm genuinely surprised, because there's seriously something off about all 3 of them.

Even if the old one's had a 'unique' artstyle you wanted to homogenize, I think that was a mistake. It made them feel like unique characters. 

Also, all these new effects in battle are really overdone. 

Coming back was a mistake. You had something once. You just had to finish and balance the game. It's all so over-designed now. 

Me, I'm a bit baffled by the choice to redraw the characters, including ones that don't get any H like Desmond. If they wanted to do a different design for these characters, it would make sense, since I can understand they used stock RPGM assets when there was no art budget. But redrawing the stock assets seems fairly pointless when the end result is really not that different.

Desmond too?

I honestly downloaded the latest version (bought on itch.io ages back) and didn't like the new portraits or battle effects so didn't really get that far before going to bed. 

Chatted to him in the bar...yeaaaahh, all his roughness is gone.

Yes but are they this feminine: 

Anyway, for an actual post, here's a shitty mockup portrait for you to use:

I basically redrew over the RPGMaker drawing because I'm a lazy bitch, but I suppose you could use it if you want to.