Re: Eroico revision V7
T Per-room checkpoints are generally in games with difficult per-room challenges (super meat boy), whereas Eroico is about attrition. The game would have to be changed so that you can only take 1-3 hits.
This is what I mean when I say it's very all or nothing. If it's made easier, then it's going to make it too easy for some people. If it's as hard as it is, then obviously people who can't make it past the first room
Not arguing you should change anything, mostly just offering my experience as feedback.
It could be that what you were going for just doesn't mesh with me. I definitely prefer a set-up like Super Meat Boy or the Prinny games over this. It's not the direct difficulty that puts me off it's having to repeat so many sections. It's actually really hard to recover from a screw up because if you eat 3-4 hits in one room you generally have a long way to go to get a health-up, and even then it doesn't recover all the damage you already took. Feels like a very slow downward spiral.
When it comes to attrition... well, as an example I absolutely love the mega-man series. Most of them are tuned to allow for a lot more hit-trading in that you can take a decent number of hits from weaker enemies and there are generally a lot more health pickups, which are also potentially farm-able if you really need to, but you're also forced to engage a lot more enemies. Eroico on the other hand is tuned to have a lot more emphasis on avoidance since you can really only take one or two hits per room, but most of the combat can be skipped. Again, just not to my personal preferences I suppose.
I am going to have to disagree with you a bit on the "All or nothing" difficulty. I mean, I get your actual point is that no matter the difficulty some will find it way too easy and some will find it way too hard, which is true, but it's still kinda poor phrasing because you make it sound like there isn't any space between "trivially easy" and "extremely punishing." A lot of games manage to punish poor play or reward skilled play in ways other than gating progress as well, so it is possible to design a potentially challenging game that still has a lower minimum skill floor for barely completing the base content.
In this case, you already implemented difficulty levels anyway. If a change makes the game "too easy" I'd lock said change to the lowest difficulty. In the case of an h-game in particular, it's probably a good idea to tune whatever the lowest possible gameplay setting is to intentionally be brain-dead easy so that people who just want the porn/story content can still get to most of it. (First example that comes to mind: Millia/Echinda wars DX. Pretty hard on higher difficulties, but trivial on Puki. But if the game was tuned such that normal was the easiest difficulty, there'd be a lot of unhappy customers for that game, I think)