do you? I started this by calling the reaction to anti-cheat being “the game is bad” silly, the rest of you ran off with it about cheating being good because the developer did not cater to a 5 minute wank
my point was ignored by all but Skinny_Guy, and that was a nice interaction where we just chatted about future plans from the dev
But I didn’t reply to that post did I? Not that It matters since you’re still making the same point. I would like you to point out where in either of my two posts I said that cheating was good or justified. Go back and re-read my original post.
You seem to be hung up on this idea that people only think the game is bad because of anti-cheat dev problems. But as I and others have explained that’s not the core issue, it’s a reaction to the problem many have with the game: they just don’t think it’s fun. The cheats are circumstantial to that main problem that was never addressed by the dev. If the dev doesn’t want to cater to his audience then that’s his choice. But he can’t also complain about the reaction to that decision when he’s done nothing to address it.
And even regardless of all of that what it comes down to is this: You think the game is good and fun. That’s your opinion. Others think the game is boring and grindy. That’s their opinion. Everyone is allowed to state their opinion regardless of their reasons for it. Maybe you’re right and some people hate this game solely because of the dev’s attitude about anti cheat. Guess what? Their opinion is just as valid as yours. You are not some special arbiter who gets to decide: “these people opinions don’t matter because they like cheating”. And if you’re hoping to change people minds, I would suggest not being so condescending and telling people they’re “coping” for trying to have a discussion with you.
a cheater’s opinion is inherently less than worth a non cheater who goes “I suck at this game…I’ll do something else”, and nothing I or anyone else will do can change the mind of a cheater once they get it in their head it is ok to do…well, you can, but that involves actual harm, which I have no interest in doing. I also did not use the word coping until
at which point I was just tired of going “I don’t care about cheating because my point is being mad at the game over how hard it is to cheat is silly”
Is this now the 5th time you’ve completely ignored the point of someone’s post to talk about something utterly inconsequential? This time you even managed to sneak in a weird tangent about violence. Now that’s impressive. This is now a waste of my time so I’ll be bowing out after this post since it’s clear you have no interest in having a good faith discussion, but I’ll make two final points.
Your behavior is starting to make a lot more sense now. This is wrong. I would like you to debase yourself of this notion that you are “superior” to someone else because you didn’t cheat at a fetish game. It’s quite frankly ridiculous and sounds like something a 10 year old would say. It’s going to be damaging to your professional life if you continue to think you’re better than others for arbitrary reasons. Nobody likes a narcissist.
Aside from the fact that you have once again not read my previous post, what exactly are you hoping to achieve by being openly hostile and condescending to people of other viewpoints. I assumed you initially started a conversation here because you wanted to change peoples minds. To have them give the game another shot. But as this has gone on it’s become apparent that’s not your goal. From insulting and belittling those who disagree with you to ignoring anyone that tries to engage in discussion about why things turned out the way they did, you’ve squandered every attempt at good will. So why are you here if not for discussion or to change minds? Is it just to make you feel better? Does that really make you happy?
There are better things in life than arguing on the internet. I’d advise you take a break and come back with a cooler more rational mindset. It’ll serve you well.
Can we please stop this argument? It’s going in circles and only upsetting people.
A mod has already stepped in. While he hasn’t needed to use his moderator powers, let’s take this as a signal we need to collectively take a deep breath and calm down.
that’s fine with me, I’m going to go start a new run through on this game and enjoy it, hope the rest of this form will do it too
Very long post alert giving my general feelings on this game, probably way too late for it to matter:
I came back to this game recently 'cause the last time I played it was back before the 2.0 versions and I remembered liking the game as a whole, but really hating how slow progression was- and it’s been a bit of a trip.
I gave the game 7 in game weeks (21 fights) on easy at first, then normal and tried to go through without cheating since the dev tried really hard to stop that (for some reason, in an offline singleplayer game) and as someone who likes RPGs, especially on the more difficult side, this game has been very frustrating. My original plan was to unlock all of the characters, but I lost my motivation for that at around the start of week 8 which is probably indicative of my feelings about the game’s replay value as a whole.
There’s stuff to like for sure- the art is great, the gameplay once you understand what’s actually happening is fun enough for about one run. However, the new player experience is kinda dogwater. There’s very little handholding, and the game expects you to be familiar with the combat system from Vale City at the start- despite making changes to it, which it will then proceed to not explain well. If you want a tutorial, you need to talk to the referee looking girl in the lobby AFTER choosing your team, so no dice on making informed decisions at the start- it’s guesswork for you. If you want specific information about the characters you choose that’s out of the way and often awkwardly presented- despite looking over her passive abilities I had no idea Lana was vegan when I first chose her and I have no idea if that’s because I misinterpreted or misread something, or if the relevant passive got lost in the sea of very similar passives and I just skimmed straight past it. It took me a fair few runs to understand the flaws with and compensate for the strats that will serve you well in the more long form RPG Vale City, and by the time I did it didn’t really matter- easy mode lets you steamroll things far too easily even without understanding basic things about the combat system.
Normal mode however is something of a slog. It’s an issue that’s already well documented in this thread but you are behind in the economy. Hard. Enemies have progressively more stats as you go (as they should) and access to their own inventory of food since food is integral to the combat system as a whole. Enemies will be packing both more food and more varieties of food than you’re likely to have even if you’re spending more of your budget than is reasonable on it, ESPECIALLY since you’ll also want statistical improvements from equipment, and/or utility items from pills. Now since food heals you AND provides your MP equivalent resource, this means that battles of attrition are a massive risk factor and also hard to avoid. There are no attacks that do not cost a resource- very specifically BP. Run out of food, and your current BP stocks will need to end the fight. Run out of food AND BP? You’ve lost, it’ll just take a while for it to happen. However, you also only gain EXP by eating food. Which means that blitzing through fights without running down your own resources will leave you incredibly underprepared for future fights. Couple this with the rather large health pools of enemies, the rather large inventories of enemies (home not just to enough food in the first round to win you the entire run, but revival items and in later fights Ultimate Pills) and your need to artificially slow down the pace of fights to level up earlier and prepare for the future, and spending your budget on anything other than food is a hard sell. On easy mode you don’t have to, enemies are nerfed to the extent where like, an ultimate pill or two to blitz down the boss is really all you need for the whole run. Which is boring, since you’re not really being challenged. And then normal mode is also boring, not because of a lack of challenge but because fights more often than not devolve into incredibly slow paced (both because of the actual numbers involved and the many slow animations until you disable them in options) slap fights devoid of much runtime strategy that isn’t “maximise EXP gain for the future” or “pray the enemy tank doesn’t use provoke so you can actually choose your attack targets and focus fire on the squishies so you don’t have to worry about your HP”.
Your starting roster is randomly determined. I believe this is a bad thing. Having a core 3 characters who engage well with the game’s universal mechanics and can serve as a tutorial party to get to grips with the game’s systems with on a first run would be a very simple way to get across some of the game’s intricacies- an actual tutorial with gameplay instead of tooltips from an otherwise entirely optional NPC would slot in very nicely alongside the little preamble at the start of the game where the other coaches are introduced. This would improve the new player’s experience by cutting down on the sheer amount of new information you have to consider while making meaningful choices you might not be able to recover from fucking up. The satisfaction of building a team from scratch can come AFTER you know what no BP does to a mfer. Additionally, information (which is often crucial in an RPG) is really badly presented to the player in some cases. I’ve seen many posts in this thread criticising how little emphasis important information is given, and how bad the UI is (even leading many people to conclude an action that costs a turn to let you see enemy information- an important advantage whether you’re new or experienced since knowing HP totals to figure out when kills are worth gunning for is good, and slim characters you’ve never seen before can be tough to tell the type of- does legitimately nothing and wastes your turn, because accessing the information you’ve unlocked is unintuitive) so that’s definitely a bad sign. I can confirm that I had no idea attacks were designated “normal” or “special” stats in their little tooltips for like 5 runs, because I saw “[special]” up there three times in a row and just assumed that was letting me know it was a special attack (hence its seperation from the normal attack command) and thus that space in all future attack text could be completely ignored under the assumption all of those attacks were “special”. Finally, developing your characters is… functional. It’s about as varied and pivotal as it can be, given that you only have a party for four fights before everything resets. That short timeframe I feel really hurts the potential ceiling for customising their skills and the like, so ultimately I can’t say it’s too exciting- which is a shame for me, because party building is one of the biggest draws to difficult RPGs in my opinion.
And then there’s the progression. I was pleasantly surprised by it being more interesting than I remembered from the 1.0 version, with an optional shop appearing requiring an investment of money (not the tournament points that carry over between runs, mid run funds that go on your food and equipment) to unlock, and was excited that what I remembered of the glacially slow TP grind would at least be supplemented by additional progression in this way. After I unlocked it, I could buy expensive but potentially good equipment, and there was a hint I could get an artificial body, like a custom robot character I’m assuming, from a black market. Exciting stuff, and a goal to chase while the TP grind could happen in the background. A shady character in the bathroom asked me for a password, so I assumed that was the in and that through some investigation in the lobby (ultimately fruitless) or my performances in the ring (we’ll get to that) I could get hooked up. Not really the case- apparently you need to get close to one of the other coaches to get in, and currently I was getting in with one of them because… it was something to do and I was getting bored of the admittedly deep but slow and (imo) unsatisfying combat. It either wasn’t the right coach, or it takes longer to get to the actual thing I wanted than a sex scene, but I lost motivation and stopped playing before getting to what I wanted.
The TP grind is slow as all hell- better than it used to be, now you can get a character after a successful win and have some change left over, but still far too slow for the progression offered. The vertical progression offered is boring, a little extra cash to play with to ease the budgetary concerns is probably as interesting as it gets- lump sums of items at the start of each run (not round, run) don’t exactly set me ablaze with wonder. The horizontal progression is nice enough, getting characters or per round item sets tied to characters that can make them better suit eachother or your playstyle, but greatly suffers from the game’s roguelike nature. Nothing you get is really required to win, and while getting characters you like the art or playstyle of is certainly good, you’ll (ironically enough given how slow the game in general is) run out of those quickly. Getting a decent grip on a character can take a run or two at most, and given that if you want a challenge at all the game can overwhelm rather quickly your decision making is actually a lot more limited than it may first appear. A complete lack of vertical progression related to the size of the characters available, the fetish content we’re probably here for, really hurts the game’s progression in general IMO since you can (and realistically should if you want to win) see the maximum size of a character the first time you ever use them- in fact the art gallery doesn’t even seem to lock sizes by seeing them in game- just giving you access to a character’s full set of sprites whenever you unlock access to that character at all. Diversifying the resources used for progression as the unlockable shop did for a while and/or having the aforementioned vertical fetish progression could do wonders for this game’s replay value, which is the heart of a roguelike. With slow progression, frustratingly obtuse mechanics hiding the actually enjoyable depth of the combat, and no way to meaningfully cut down on the grind without cheating, which the dev is staunchly against allowing, the game doesn’t really have much to draw you back in aside from very nice art. Even learning the game’s systems is ultimately unrewarding, as I’ve noted the game’s lack of challenge on easy mode and there are no rewards for being on any difficulty higher- not even extra TP for winning which would have both provided an incentive to improve AND cut down on the grind. Also, anticheat discussion in the thread above got pretty heated it looked like, so I tried to avoid bringing it up as much as possible, but my thoughts on it are that it’s just weird to be so staunchly against cheating in a singleplayer game when they’re ok with easy mode reducing progression to a mindless grind.
EDIT: Also it’s a shame there’s not really external resources for information on the game and its mechanics, given the game does such a poor job at explaining itself. That could help the game a fair bit.
TL;DR Really nice art! Mechanically it’s rather deep if you can be bothered to learn it, but in my experience it’s not really worth trying. There’s also massive issues with the pacing, and user experience in general. Worth checking out, playing with until you’re bored, then dropping.
Dang, pop off my dude. I felt similar but didn’t get as far so I figured I just didn’t get into it enough. 
Not really. Some older games used to do this back in the day if you cheated at all/too much. (already mentioned Banjo Kazooie being one such example, although iirc Grunhilda gives you a warning first)
I would prefer it if you cheated your next battle would just be a super hard enemy that messes you up rather than delete everything (similar to Witcher 3 if you kill too many cows and the were-cow thing shows up), but at the end of the day, it’s not my game. The dev can go in any direction he pleases, if he wants to go crazy over cheaters he has the right.
Someone knows how get charlotte?
Can someone explain to me a general strategy for this game, I have been playing for a few days and still can’t get past the first fight.
I’m no expert, but here’s a few tips on how I finish runs:
Thanks for the help!