I would prefer the inconsistency, honestly. Part of what makes Gumia by Grimimic so good is the ability to alter sizes for the characters. Grim did the math, realized that 99% of an RPG is spent either fighting or walking around, and so invested a lot of time and effort into making sure that the fetishes (expansion, weight gain, inflation, BE, ect) were present at all times during those two activities. He completely reworked the RPG Maker engine to support larger and more detailed sprites, specifically to serve this purpose. And I don’t think it was wasted effort for him to do so. It’s literally what makes Gumia so good.
I’ve got a section in the review I’m working on for Some Bullshit where I bring this up, but by comparison, the fetish content here is… actually really scarce, comparatively speaking. You hang your hat more or less entirely on scenes, and to be fair, you do have a lot of them, I agree with that. But SB is still an RPG, so you still spend 99% of your time either walking or fighting. And the fetish isn’t really present in either of these activities.
Because SB is a first-person battle view instead of a spectator/referee battle view from the sidelines, we don’t get to see Emmy repeatedly fatten up and slim down during fights when she eats and then digests fullness into mana. If it were a side-view style, we could get content similar to what it looks like when fighting Possessed Emmy in the laboratory, and force-feeding her pies. But it’s a first-person view instead, we never see our party during battle. So the fetish doesn’t exist at all during fights.
And when walking, the sprites are smaller than Grimimic’s modded ones, but at the very least, they DID feature the ability to stuff Emmy with food. Which made stuffing Emmy with purchased food and walking around with her the main source of fetish entertainment between scenes. It wasn’t EXTRAVAGENT, but it was something. It was nice, a logical and assumed-to-exist feature of an RPG about stuffing.
I understand there were technical difficulties involved with maintaining it. But I would argue that it was worth maintaining, and I would hope that if you ever commit to a “this is the final update, for real this time” update, you would consider putting the feature back in for the rest of the game. Since after that point there would, of course, be no further updates that could break it.
Also, and I don’t want this to sound insulting, so please don’t take it that way. But “you can turn it on in the postgame” feels like a pretty huge cop-out. Being able to assign a size to Emmy or Clara after the game is beaten feels pointless, because the game is already over. Why would it matter at that point? The adventure is already over, there’s nowhere left to walk to. We’re not wandering around or exploring the world anymore, it’s done. There is no New Game+, as far as I know. If you’ve beaten the game but are still hanging around in your save file for fetish reasons, you wouldn’t BE walking around and “admiring the view,” you’d be hanging out in the memories hall and repeating those scenes, wouldn’t you?
For it to have any value, you’d basically need to start the game with it. Personally, I’d rather have Emmy and Clara not be consistent between their overworld and cutscene states at all, but both of them have fully-functional size changes with multiple stages and upgrades. It even feels like you flirted with the idea later, by giving Clara the ability to expand her capacity a few times and thus become larger when visiting the café, even though she technically has no fullness, unlike Emmy.
I don’t care about consistency in cutscene transitions. I care about the fat women. Stuffed belly = good, more stuffed belly = better. Less stuffed belly = sad.
Grimimic actually implemented a similar system in Gumia, to what you’re describing for your postgame. But in Gumia, you could find key items hidden around the world that would set different characters to that associated appearance when used, and the items could be toggled on and off in the pause menu at any time. So he made it an ongoing scavenger hunt/quest reward thing, where you slowly earn the ability to toggle all the different sizes and appearances for the characters as you play the game. I felt that was a really good idea, personally. He made it a featured mechanic of the game.
(I’m not intentionally bringing it up over and over again, but Grim did some pretty interesting things, and the games are very similar, so the comparison is natural.)
Also, I understand about not wanting to update based on minor bugs, I wouldn’t either. I’m just reporting things that I find to try and be helpful. If you want me to stop, just let me know.
