Re: [Red Dragonfly] Sangoku Sword Hime
Some thoughts based on demo:
1. Awesome attack animations and overall graphics. Official English support so no more menu guessing and I can actually follow the plot. As expected, the h-content is very good. Looks like they also fixed the animation glitches from the previous game.
2. Power scaling is extremely wonky, seemingly even more unbalanced than the previous game. You start off fighting into a mob where you get countered if you attempt more than 2 slashes. Against the lighter monsters (ex. archers), the knockback is so high the 3rd hit hit won't combo with the first two anyways. Since you only do 5 damage vs their 140~200 hp, it takes a long time to get your first kill.
Then maybe after your first or second mob clear, you get your first weapon...which triples your starting damage because of the new weapon system. Then you get your first 100 gold and purchase the combo upgrade and clearing mobs becomes significantly quicker. Pick up the remaining 2 weapons in the demo and now you 2-shot most enemies. You quickly farm enough gold to max out the combo upgrade and now mobs can't even get a hit in before dying. Mobs in later areas would need exponential boosts in hp to stay alive past the first combo.
Since I don't have the full game, I don't know if this is only the case in the demo. Perhaps the developer intentionally sped things up so people could check out some content past early game without excessive grinding.
3. I like how some of the buildings can be destroyed by just a girl and her swords. Though I wish the enemies would take damage from a building falling on top of them. I mentioned how the environment is beautifully designed. However, the space seems to be a waste. You don't get much combat advantage from luring them to the buildings. Since there aren't any hidden treasures, not much incentive to stray away from the main path unless you just want to check out the scenery.
4. Gallery mode is an awesome addition, a lot better implementation than the previous game. Once again, I don't know if it is different in the full version, but the scene navigation could use some adjustments. Not too hard to scroll through the 4 enemies but if there's going to be 50 enemies with 5 options each, it's going to be fairly troublesome to navigate through scenes.
What I would change is make it so that the scene selection has 2 rows rather than scrolling through 1. Instead of picking specific scenes, you select an enemy and a menu for position and speed shows up like it does during regular gameplay. To compensate for extra clutter on the screen, make an option to hide the menu.
Also, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the field needs some trimming in the middle.
This is based off my ~20 minute run of the demo so feel free to correct me on something I missed or how the full version differs if you have it. Hopefully the developed releases a future update addressing the problems in gallery mode.
