Re: Monstergirls Unlimited RPG
I've played many an RPG in my time(You know, every day for nearly my entire 20-year life span)...
1. About a 2 or 3. Not very difficult so far.
2. I was level 4 when I met Salyri
3. She wasn't very difficult, because I was smart enough to get a bunch of antidotes early on, and I was pretty frugal with my potions(Level four is also the point where you survive 3 of her attacks in a row, giving you another round to pummel her). I would say the hardest thing is surviving to meet her with full health and a decent supply of recovery items if you want to fight every fight along the way.
A few things you should probably do:
#Give the player some antidotes with the potions you're given early.
#Give the player some gold to start with(100? 200? Something like that).
#Implement a step counter(RPGMaker makes it pretty easy to do that, iirc), and cause the milking/eggs/centaur to be based off that(Event reset every 200 steps or something similar). You could use this to balance early-game income and make it not so trivial to get obscenely rich without much effort.
#Balance - Change the Alarune's pollen attack to not cause AOE poison, it gets extremely expensive very quickly. One fight costs you 40G to cure the poison, and they only give 15 gold. Perhaps make them have a single-target poison attack, and an AOE damage attack with the -attack power debuff?
#Balance - Salyri's damage is currently tuned for a 4-6 level range or so. At level 3, you have too few health and have to put a person on full-time healing(Not a bad thing).
#Balance - Salyri needs more health(Or defense). She goes down far too quickly for a boss, imho. 4-5 turns and she's smoked, which I think is far too easy.
#Balance - Salyri's Life Drain attack should hit for 3XX, rather than 2XX(It is a special attack, after all. It should be more deadly than bitch slapping me). Increase its damage by 60-80 or so?
#Encounters - Encounter rate is too high. You fight an enemy virtually every half dozen steps, which gets rather tedious pretty quickly. Reduce the encounter rate.
#Encounters - Enemy experience is a bit too high for up to Salyri, or the EXP-TO-NEXT is too low. Easiest fix at this point would probably be to reduce the EXP of the slime to 6, and the Alarune to 12. You can grind to level 8 or so on the way to Salyri without much effort, and lay waste to her in 3 turns without healing at all.
#Encounters - Enemies don't hit hard enough. They should hit for 30-40ish so that you have to recover now and then(Slime attacks! You are dealt a pitiful, measly 6 points of damage. The slime is a total pansy. You point and laugh at it until it begins to cry). They're monster(girl)s, not wet noodles.
So far, it looks like I could beat everything including Salyri at Level 1, which isn't that bad, since it's about an hour long game at the moment.
The only part of the game that's lacking is that it's not very challenging.
Despite that, everything else is amazing! Excellent work, especially on the writing. I most certainly enjoy the fact that nearly every NPC has something different to say rather than canned phrases that you see over and over.
P.S. I've done beta testing for several games in my day and I have high standards(Mostly about gameplay). ^_^
Edit: I was looking on the MGU forum, and your 0.5 changelog just pwnt me. Many things I was suggesting were already on the list, haha. Many <3s