Okay, so i nearly finished the game (i have just one more optional boss to hunt down in order to finish the game) so i thought of doing a mini review of sorts...
The game is excellent H-wise, but everything else is bad to the point of where i just said fuck this at some point and rushed trough the late game. To explain that a bit more the biggest issue with the game is how you actually have to do the true route to actually see the real ending and i just can't deal with how bullshit the story is at this point (more on that ahead).
The real story goes something like this: Kurii and Hermia basically wanted to kidnap Leaf from the very start and have her fight in the arena just like the good old days, but Hermia's subordinates went ahead and screwed up kidnapping the princess instead, which lead to them having to improvise and turn the whole thing into a fuckshow (the reason being that attack magic straight out doesn't work on this island so they expected a weapons based fight but the princesses forte is actually magic and because of that she couldn't do anything with Leaf's sword which was brought in for the sake of the fight).
Now the reason for all of that is that Kurii basically needed to secure a large amount of funds in order to continue her excavations of the ancient ruins that were ongoing on the island while Hermia just wanted humans to stay on the island for as long as possible (her explanation is that succubuses like getting their "nourishment" from humans the most)...
Add to this whole situation the head of the native demons Balthasar (the girl who you can see in the dungeons putting the side bosses around) doing her best to sabotage the entire thing in order to drive away the meddlers from the island and you get this whole mess...
The main issue with all of this is that you only get to the point where you know all of this if you can be bothered to defeat all of the optional bosses and the problem with that is the downright bullshit difficulty of those fights. For anyone that says i'm not right i say i dare you to fight the mimic boss fair and square and win at least two times in a row consistently (i barely pulled that fight once after a dozen of tries)...
The balance is just seriously bad in the second half of the game. The fighting techniques you get from fighting teacher Roshi (that is seriously the dudes name, lol) just don't cut it later on and make even the fights with the small fry enemies drag on for so long that i just avoided the enemies altogether (the reason being the fact that all of them have like 90% resistance to all types of damage). The traps will also almost oneshot you later on (at this point i have something like 8000HP and about 800MP and traps hit me for like 80% of my total HP) which makes dungeons a pain to traverse. Also here's a tip: the damage traps inflict on you scales with the maximum amount of HP and MP you have as well with Leaf's sensitivity values...
Now the bonus content: At some point you will have purchasable photos in the starting shop which will give you lore bits in order to make things more interesting along with Kurii and Hermia explaining things in detail, but that lore is contradictory to everything TOD established in the previous games...
Basically the dude went ahead and killed all the consistency his games had lorewise... For example the game explained Leaf's strength with some nonsense how she has a divine protection of the wild that gives her power, but in return she gets into heat like an animal and has to fuck animals (in her case her favorite horse)... Now call me stupid or something but in Lilyknight saga she was neither one of the holy knights (divine protections are reserved to those only), nor did she have an actual divine protection yet she could wield her zweihander just fine...
Also the princess apparently shoots porn on regular basis as a hobby... So yeah i think TOD was just so out of ideas that he started pulling things out of his ass just to be done with this game already...
Anyway these are just some of the gripes i have with the game, and at this point i can honestly say i will not be playing any future games TOD might release...
PS: The real ending also depends on the number of appeals you have done (basically you have to hunt down all of the available H-scenes in order to get anywhere and some of those have downright cryptic conditions to trigger).
Edit#1: Fixed a ton of typos...
Idk what you're talking about with the lore-breaking stuff. With the horse thing you used as an example, they specifically say the protection she has from Leoniz (or however you translate it) is completely different from the divine protection the holy knights have.
【ハーミア】「リーフ様は身体に面白い加護を宿してるせいで、 頻繁にこういう事をしたくなっちゃうらしいのよ」
【クィリー】「守護騎士の加護とはまた別の加護ですね」
【ハーミア】「具体的にはレオニズっていう星の加護なんだけど。 こいつ、体全体のパワーを上昇させる凄いやつなの」
And correct me if I'm misremembering, wasn't the princess in this game also in one of the previous games, in which most of the characters have multiple swimsuit porn shoots? Time has passed since then and whatever the fuck the creator wants to have taken place in his world since then is fine, all the more so if the stuff he's said is happening has already happened before. And even if I'm mistaken, going by literally every single female character we've ever seen in this universe, it's pretty easy to convince them to just do porn shoots. It's hardly "pulling things out of his ass" when it's his modus operandi.
Can't agree on the difficulty either. Any enemies that resist "90% of all damage types" usually have a specific weakness. Ghosts, for example, are weak to the hip attack, as you're told when taught it, and since you don't have the hip attack when you enter the area the little imps tell you that they're also really weak to counter (only took two counters to kill them when I first got there). Plus, most of the enemies also have the whole thing where you can just stock up on items in the shop to instakill them (and still get the rewards!) if you don't want to fight them.
Pretty sure you were doing bosses wrong too. At the first one, the game tells you to just skip them for now if they're too hard. The obvious approach to take is to fight them once and lose for the H-scene when you first encounter them, then come back the next day when you're a bit over-leveled to fight it for real. The mimic was the easiest second fight in the game for me (only 10 mp to break out of hypnosis, and this was before I knew I coulda grabbed the anti-hypnosis goggles from the lab before coming back to fight it!), and I just outright destroyed the graveyard boss in the first fight since I happened to have some insecticide left over.
Never encountered a trap that could remotely oneshot me in the whole game too. Have you been using the experience books that specifically warn you that they also increase sensitivity? And not drinking the sensitivity-lowering potion in the lab? (Which I also never needed to use, but hey, it's there.) Really not sure why our gameplay was so different here, traps never felt bad to me once.
I don't wanna be the "git gud" guy, but I breezed through this game as straightforwardly as possible without grinding and never ran into a single hiccup, so, y'know.
