I've already played a previous prototype that you posted elsewhere and I provided some feedback on it a while back - mainly about UI stuff. A lot of this has been addressed and it's my second time through, so the game went by pretty smoothly this time around.
The only new UI complaint: The timing schedule gets pretty crowded with all the dolls that Alice summons. It only gets bad at the very end, so whatever joke you wrote for the description of her Last Word is going to go unread. At least you can still see how long the cast time is underneath her on-map icon.
With this second playthough, I think my opinion on the gameplay has solidified: What's here would be great as the Normal difficulty of a game that has four difficulty levels.
You are given lots of resources and it's very clear where to use them. For example, in the Mokou fight there are obvious places to use Stardust (centered on Mokou), Inner Sight and Hakurei Amulet (on Youmu, to soak kicks), and Phantom Step and Shooting Star (to dodge the charge attack). Dream Barrier is unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes. All three of your health bars are unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes.
I think creating harder content by removing the extra resources (or creating a harder fight that demands their usage) would work. Maybe. It would almost turn in to a puzzle game: Sokoban-but-with-lasers. "There is precisely one delicate path of moves and attacks that will solve this encounter, and you will try things until you find it." I gave myself a taste of that by trying to beat Mokou without using Reimu at all (it is possible, I found out) - the process of iterating my strategy was fun, but I can't go through this process again, because I know what the finished strategy looks like now.
After doing that and thinking about what I would want from new and/or harder content, I realize that everything in this game is so deterministic and fair. It's nice, but a Hard or Lunatic tactics game would probably be frustrating to play in such a rigid environment. It might be fun to try some boss designs that force you to change tactics on the fly instead.
Even adding some dumb random events like "On Hard mode the boss can rarely announce a target other than Youmu and attack them once instead" or "On Hard mode, an extra summon is randomly added to the schedule" might make for more interesting play. The player has to cover multiple options and will be forced to spend health to keep things on track more often.
I'm not sure if that would be very congruous with the current design of the game ("Deterministic and fair"), but it's the direction that I think I see when I try to imagine how this game could become more fun to replay and master. Unless the plan is to stick a team-building RPG between each fight, or something. There's plenty of ways to add variance to games, depending on the kind of tactics you want to demand from the player.
Anyway, I enjoyed my playthrough of this prototype, just like the last one. I'm rooting for you.
I'll almost certainly make a Lunatic version of each stage that unlocks after you've beaten it once, which adds tighter tuning and extra mechanics. That will have to wait until I'm done making major changes to the PCs' kits, though. In particular, I'd like to try adding a party-building component where you pick any three characters from a pool of maybe five or six, and I expect that to break everything.
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I've already played a previous prototype that you posted elsewhere and I provided some feedback on it a while back - mainly about UI stuff. A lot of this has been addressed and it's my second time through, so the game went by pretty smoothly this time around.
The only new UI complaint: The timing schedule gets pretty crowded with all the dolls that Alice summons. It only gets bad at the very end, so whatever joke you wrote for the description of her Last Word is going to go unread. At least you can still see how long the cast time is underneath her on-map icon.
With this second playthough, I think my opinion on the gameplay has solidified: What's here would be great as the Normal difficulty of a game that has four difficulty levels.
You are given lots of resources and it's very clear where to use them. For example, in the Mokou fight there are obvious places to use Stardust (centered on Mokou), Inner Sight and Hakurei Amulet (on Youmu, to soak kicks), and Phantom Step and Shooting Star (to dodge the charge attack). Dream Barrier is unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes. All three of your health bars are unnecessary, and can be used to cover for mistakes.
I think creating harder content by removing the extra resources (or creating a harder fight that demands their usage) would work. Maybe. It would almost turn in to a puzzle game: Sokoban-but-with-lasers. "There is precisely one delicate path of moves and attacks that will solve this encounter, and you will try things until you find it." I gave myself a taste of that by trying to beat Mokou without using Reimu at all (it is possible, I found out) - the process of iterating my strategy was fun, but I can't go through this process again, because I know what the finished strategy looks like now.
After doing that and thinking about what I would want from new and/or harder content, I realize that everything in this game is so deterministic and fair. It's nice, but a Hard or Lunatic tactics game would probably be frustrating to play in such a rigid environment. It might be fun to try some boss designs that force you to change tactics on the fly instead.
Even adding some dumb random events like "On Hard mode the boss can rarely announce a target other than Youmu and attack them once instead" or "On Hard mode, an extra summon is randomly added to the schedule" might make for more interesting play. The player has to cover multiple options and will be forced to spend health to keep things on track more often.
I'm not sure if that would be very congruous with the current design of the game ("Deterministic and fair"), but it's the direction that I think I see when I try to imagine how this game could become more fun to replay and master. Unless the plan is to stick a team-building RPG between each fight, or something. There's plenty of ways to add variance to games, depending on the kind of tactics you want to demand from the player.
Anyway, I enjoyed my playthrough of this prototype, just like the last one. I'm rooting for you.
Awesome, thanks!
I'll almost certainly make a Lunatic version of each stage that unlocks after you've beaten it once, which adds tighter tuning and extra mechanics. That will have to wait until I'm done making major changes to the PCs' kits, though. In particular, I'd like to try adding a party-building component where you pick any three characters from a pool of maybe five or six, and I expect that to break everything.