game suddenly got extremely easy?

[Jesse]

hey

absolutely loving the game so far, writing, characters, music, art, gameplay all really great.

something I noticed tho, starting around the gladiator fight onwards (I'm at the end of the game now) all the bosses suddenly got WAY easy. In the first half I had to pretty regularly heal and fights took a while. Now first round of turns I enrage Verm, shield break the boss, then encore Verm, and Verm does 198 damage his one attack on the first turn.... and the bosses are doing like, 1 damage. The gladiator boss was only 1v1 but even that I think I won in 2 turns just from enrage and attacking? Then the scissor sisters boss was really amazing look and cool but also super easy, and then I did the white hall boss, that was harder than the other but I still only healed once and killed half the boss by the second turn and I think 2 more turns for the other half.

Did I just accidentally luck out into finding the strongest items or builds? I know it's probably balanced towards making sure if someone skips all extra content and picks the weakest leveling path they can still win, so maybe I just picked all the strongest stuff? The early boss battled I thought were amazing because they were challenging enough that you really had to watch your health and choose to defend and heal sometimes or you'd die, and that's completely gone now.

anyone else having this happen? besides that though, I do want to say again i LOVE the game and have been recommending it to tons of people. Definitely one of my faves this year.

[Gruffle Ploum]

The game got extremely easy the moment Siobhan got an AOE and wasn't that much more difficult before that.
I adore this game and am happy I backed it for the story and style if nothing else, but I would love a difficulty slider even if it's as simple as "numbers bigger now".

[Arzaac]

Yeah the game is honestly just really easy. Verm is extremely powerful, Siobhan isn't that much worse (and better for AoE), and both Gwen and Bruce can be easily spec'd to enable Verm or Siobhan to go completely ham.

Honestly I still really liked the game, its strengths are more related to the story, characters, and world. It would be interesting to see a hard mode where I actually have to think about my turns a bit though.

[Truffle]

I really enjoyed the game, but suffice to say the balance of difficulty is really bad. By the end I was killing bosses (including end game) in three rounds max. Especially if you get Siobhan's spec point to start with overclock, and later once you've got Verm's final ability, you can do like near 100 damage. Gwen and Bruce pretty much ensure that Siobhan and Verm can do max damage, super fast.

I'd still recommend the game though, I love the look of the world, the characters and story. The difficulty lets me down, but for the price, I find it worth it.

I will say one thing that really let me down for a boss focused battle game was the lack of tricks. In the entire game there are only two that enter a counter attack state for one round, the rest don't really do anything that unique from each other, same extremely limited pool of stat effects (Which were so rarely applied and quickly gone it was comical). They look cool, great music, but it's little more than them button mashing the same one or two attacks.

[Draggy]

I on the other hand actually like that the game is easy, it's exactly what I expected from a cute RPG about small little animals like mice, squirrels etc. Games are often either too easy or too hard for some ppl, it's a personal thing. This game is obviously story and character-oriented and it obviously rewards exploration and careful play, so no wonder it gets too easy by the end, that means you understand its battle system and use it to your advantage. You make it easier by learning abilities, using items and buying good equipment, one probably could make it hard if they wanted by simply not using items, equipment or using limited abilities. Of course there could also be some DLCs for those wanting challenges but I prefer the main story in RPGs not being hard. Side-content, not obligatory can be hard, like Weapons in Final Fantasy VII. Main game was easy, Emerald and Ruby were hard.

[Meredith K Pseudonym]

I still don't actually know how items work - never needed to try them out. What I do know is getting grabbed was a mild nuisance, Verm's special is crazy good, Verm's special with the bleed skill is beyond absurd and giving Siobhan makes really big, satisfying numbers way too late to matter, because jeez Verm.

[Truffle]

Originally posted by Draggy:

I on the other hand actually like that the game is easy, it's exactly what I expected from a cute RPG about small little animals like mice, squirrels etc. Games are often either too easy or too hard for some ppl, it's a personal thing. This game is obviously story and character-oriented and it obviously rewards exploration and careful play, so no wonder it gets too easy by the end, that means you understand its battle system and use it to your advantage. You make it easier by learning abilities, using items and buying good equipment, one probably could make it hard if they wanted by simply not using items, equipment or using limited abilities. Of course there could also be some DLCs for those wanting challenges but I prefer the main story in RPGs not being hard. Side-content, not obligatory can be hard, like Weapons in Final Fantasy VII. Main game was easy, Emerald and Ruby were hard.

I do agree with this view point in part, I also sometimes enjoy an easier ride. However one of the selling points is a "Tightly focused, no grinding, boss encounter" game. So I have to hold it to higher expectations that an advertised feature of the game be a solidly balanced one.

But the thing with RPG battle systems is yea, you get better gear, better abilities, in the right setting you never feel over powered, you're getting stronger to take on the tougher world ahead of you. You have to develop new strategies for each boss you come across, which simply isn't the case here in a "boss encounter" focused game.

Personally I wouldn't call it understanding the battle system if there is one "Always win" method by the midway point. Do you have to use that method? Of course not, you can handicap yourself absolutely, but having to force a handicap on myself for a "boss encounter" game is just bad balancing.

For the most part bosses here are not what I would define as bosses in the gameplay sense, they are very sparse encounters that don't each have unique challenges about them to overcome, and in my book that's just a regular enemy with a different skin.

[Jesse]

I agree also that I like that it's easy, I don't want it to be hard, but I brought up the second half because it gets EXTREMELY easy - and the reason that became an issue was, for example with the gladiator fight, it was so awesome visually and with the music and I finished in like 10 seconds. It wasn't long enough for me to enjoy and soak up the atmosphere of the boss. Same with the sol hill snake or the white hall boss. I beat the while hall boss so quickly I didn't even see what the knife did.

Even if the bosses artificially inflated their health (something I usually dislike in combat difficulty) I think that might help. I could see the bosses later having triple the health and maybe 25-50% increased damage and that alone would make the encounters more exciting and still easy.

[Meredith K Pseudonym]

Originally posted by Jesse:

I agree also that I like that it's easy, I don't want it to be hard, but I brought up the second half because it gets EXTREMELY easy - and the reason that became an issue was, for example with the gladiator fight,

Oh yeah, that one. The gimmick of that fight comes up maybe twice before it's over and you can ignore it completely in favour of a fast kill.

The combat system in general has very little to work with or work around. A lot of the complications in the boss are less "Here's a shift in strategy" more "Miss a turn". In fact, it's mostly very explicit cases of "Miss a turn". If I think really hard, I might be able to name some things you need to respond to but when it comes to the gods, it's "Focus fire", for Leo it's just "Basic attack needle repeatedly, big followup" and the Twins duel is more or less "First rage turn: Nimble. Second turn: other PC defends." There's also an "Actually, this is just a lot of freebies to power up for a massive hit" - might've been the hedgehog.

[Inoue]

I like the easy difficulty because it reminds me of Chrono Trigger. It also shows that it is full of content instead of being barren with grinding.

[Sorcha The Wise]

i enjoyed becoming rodents that genuinely Felt like they were leagues above the rest - perhaps strong enough to kill a god

but i will not be recommending the game to anyone pursuing a challenge. if you have any ability to locate gear, if you have experience with this genre of game or stats based gearing - the game becomes a cake walk very quickly

[Draggy]

Yea I kinda like that caring about characters and their equipment and upgrading pays off. I often manage to complete RPGs without dying even. This game surely never intended to be for ppl looking for challenge, it's like those pokemon games, you play for positive experience and cuteness.

[RogueTheTieflingTTV]

I mean honestly it probably is because it just got released I mean look at cult of the lamb. When I played that game when it first came out even on the hardest difficulty I went through the game super easy. Now that the game has had a few updates they upped the difficulty and made it harder. I have seen this with other indie games as well it will get more balanced later on.

[Usuario No Registrado]

I really enjoyed the game's story and world, but yeah the combat was kind of boring because of how easy it is.

[Draggy]

Just saw the developer wrote in twitter that they upped the difficulty anyway.

[Kitsyfluff]

I just finished replaying the game with the difficulty increase. the bonus bosses give a good challenge, but many of the mid-game bosses feel about the same, maybe their defense got buffed a bit. I think it could be buffed a bit more throughout the entire game. but it feels better than it was.