LADYMAPI'S PROFILE

1) I feel like the game could've benefited from way more enemy variety - I know it was an experiment, but outside of the final boss (which I haven't beaten yet), I've run into three common enemy types and one optional mini-boss... and that's it. Since most enemies only have 1-2 moves that they spam, this did lead to fights getting a little tedious near the end.

2) This game really needs to be better at communicating what things do. Even after spending a couple hours with the game, I still don't know how Death Sensitivity is supposed to work (I'm not sure if it even triggered, or how I'd know if it did?). More importantly, you don't get an explanation of what Lash/Internal/Cave-In do until you spend your single-use item to teach them to a character, so I never felt like I was making an informed decision.

3) Actually, speaking of Lash/Internal/Cave-In... I do have some questions about how they work (despite using them a bunch). First off, does their damage depend on who uses them, or does everyone get roughly the same damage when they Lash an enemy (for example). Also, am I imagining things or does Cave-In deal extra damage to enemies that are in the Fray?

4) The grim reaper enemies near felt like absolute bullshit. The rest of the game is built on managing risk and avoiding damage entirely, and then suddenly the game introduces an enemy that ignores the whole system. I get that the idea is to add an enemy that you have to prioritize, but doing it by having it auto-hit for full damage feels cheap.

5) Another similarly cheap-feeling fight was, ironically, made up entirely of the basic skeletons. The fight with five skeletons that you can run into after jumping down the pit is a crapshoot, since there's a reasonable chance that one of them will randomly engage Guruntum and then another one will one-shot them, with absolutely no counterplay since it happened between two of your characters' turns. I think that this is a sign that the damage is too high - it should probably take two hits to kill the Supplicant so that the player can actually react to the threat.

6) Waiting instead of moving between rooms felt useful in exactly one room, and otherwise seemed pointless. I think this is another "not adequately communicated to the player" thing, since it feels like it assumes that you have some sense of enemy "patrol patterns". I've done multiple runs, including one where I fully mapped out the dungeon, and I still don't know if there's any way to avoid fights other than going around them.

7) OK, I've been pretty negative so far... but the Fray is really damn clever. It's a surprisingly physical system in an otherwise traditional menu-based combat system, and it feels obvious that this game only scratched the surface of what you can do with it (my favorite moment was in the fight with the minotaur guy - the move where it charges into the middle of the party was so dang cool).

8) The decision to make the game an escort mission was a good one. Like, you'd think that baby-sitting the White Mage would be boring, but it really made the threat management system pop. Good job there.

9) The plot was minimal, but honestly pretty intriguing? I also love that you get the choice to either let the villain monologue or interrupt them, which felt like a nice touch since the player probably only has 30 minutes or so left when they get to the final boss.

1) Skeleton archers that can always attack your characters, but who miss if they're in the Fray.
2) Slow zombies that go after everyone else but hit super hard.
3) Bats that can't be Engaged but can't attack themselves.
4) Bomb enemies that explode after X turns and hurt everything currently in the Fray.

2. I did actually spam Fire/Ice Blade... but it didn't really feel like the fight was going quickly because I'd solved the puzzle, if that makes sense. My point was more-or-less that you can't lose if you have the right accessory on, so what attacks you use is pretty pointless.

4. I found Defend to be really useful in general (probably because I was hilariously underleveled for most of the game). Taking off a single turn to only take a quarter of the damage you'd normally take for the rest of the fight meant I could go longer without healing, which meant that I had enough money to go into the Nox fight with 12 Max Potions without really needing to grind. :p

5. That's a good point. I still think that the Zombies are a better mana-grinding enemy despite the lower returns, though, because they rarely could hit me and generally failed to deal much damage if they did hit. And hey, it meant I didn't have to worry about the traps.