raocow's talkhaus

Overall I really like the content update. While the August patch had nice improvements and adjustments in making the game easier, this patch changed the game's flavor. I was surprised by the different tone of the game; it was a lot darker, as seen in the title screen and the extended Chaser Virus part. The fight in that part reminded me of Silent Hill or that Yume Nikki game.

The revamped overworld design was neat. Adding "how to play" was a really good idea, particularly since in the original, you could only read the ship controls once. The cutscenes for levels was a nice touch; the game flowed better, more akin to its predecessor. They helped the game feel more like a game than a set of levels.

The bonus challenges were pretty fun but man were they difficult. At first it didn't seem likely that I would get very high scores so I planned to end those at silver medals, but somehow I managed to get the golds.

This isn't exactly related to the newest release, but I found out many of the advanced techniques while watching the current LP or reading comments or playing alongside. Until recently, I didn't know about the Blast Off + Wind Burst super boost, or how to use dash kick off the wall effectively, or the focus and fire mode change in 5-1. I also found out that you used Amu from Shugo Chara.

I really liked the added world 2. When I played it, the aesthetics of it (background visual details and BGM) were just amazing, to the point it felt a bit out-of-place with the rest of the game. The monkeys were kind of annoying but I got used to them. The difficulty was pretty fitting for a world 2, nicely bridging to the tougher later worlds.

Also, world 2 provided an opportunity to be more creative with elemental attacks. See, I realized that while it's ideally best to aim for full 20 damage, that element is not always the most effective way to hit the enemy. The enemies introduced in world 2 help test that because they have 25 HP, instead of a multiple of 20. As in, I used water and wind together against the skelly bat and sometimes used fireballs against the monkey instead of rocks. I liked that because it adds some beneficial complexity to the game.

Most of the existing content seemed to be fine, and I noticed some of the changes making things easier, such as the health drops. I do think they help the player's confidence.

Several things came up when I watched the 5-1 video. Not being able to change the control setup made the control somewhat cumbersome. And as I mentioned in the other thread, the charge shot isn't that useful as is. I also had the thought about that amusing click-spawn glitch: a skilled player can use it to chain kills. But that would be hard to control.

Now I had this idea about adding a hard difficulty to DT2 based on the older, original version of the game. I know the previous version released around last August toned down the game difficulty, so the hard mode would be based on the June version. Some of us beat the game in that version so we know it's possible. ;)

This could be called Distorted setting or something and like in DT1, changes made in the newer versions would be reverted, unless they were glitch corrections or you deem the changes to be necessary. For example, the boss attacks could do more damage, but IMO the smoothing out of the Chaser Virus mechanics should remain since that's more of an improvement than simply a toning down.

The original score requirements would carry along with the revert (including terrain, traps, and health items on the ground, damage values for the enemies and bosses). Of course, comparable changes would need to be made for world 2 and maybe the extended sequence with the Chaser Virus, since those weren't there before.

It's just an idea. You don't have to be pressured into it if you're busy.

I can't think of many games off the top of my head that have you get used to the physics engine by maneuvering without the jump. Even in Bunny Must Die, which required you to get a powerup to turn around, you still had your jump from the very start. Getting around without the jump is really easy, as a tutorial should be, but managing without was a clever challenge. It also creates the sense that you'll be building characters from the ground up, from rock bottom to equal or exceeding that of previous titles.

The beginning sequence also quickly makes point that the world isn't working as it should. The very first thing you do is clip into a wall and slowly descend. The forced damage, even to me was pretty funny. It demands perfection in the shooting mini-game, which I would say is kind of harsh as the very first thing the player has to do, but I've completed it three times with no failures, so I suppose it's fine the way it is. The backseat gaming was also funny, and I have a feeling I missed out on a lot of it by not sucking. Sometime I'll be sure to go back and do that.

It's the same atmosphere as Initiate's Pass, but here is where you can relax and focus on the details instead of platforming. The song is soothing, and the visuals are pretty grand. I also like how the birds attack the enemies and sometimes even break open health containers for you if you do happen to get hit. Stratum Steppe feels like the safest place in the game. Especially after emerging from an Extra Gate, that familiar, easygoing song is nice to hear.

Here's where the character differences start to become apparent, unless the player is stubborn and doesn't want to use Claire (they'll be forced to later). I ended up using Claire for most of this, since her physics were more familiar. It was kind of funny how "too good" Jerry's platforming engine is now in comparison to Claire's, and that I actually had to get used to it. I can see how, to someone who never played DT1 or DT2, Claire can feel like the Proto Man of this game, which I like in theory. Claire eventually became much more useful to me than Jerry, but I'll go back to that after Access Gate 3, when it's relevant.

The Mario area, to the surprise of precisely no one, does a good job of focusing on the jump, using it for basic level navigation at first, then dodging traps and killing the exclusive enemies the Mario skill set works on. The player is rewarded with total mastery of their new ability by being able to collect the powerups immediately, rather than come back for them later, which I like. It encourages the player to get a grasp of precisely what they can do with their new ability very early on.

The free potion event doesn't work. I've been told to trigger it before going into Bullet Bill Hell, and the event did trigger, but I didn't get a potion. At the time, I didn't care, because I didn't intend to use it. This bug is already well-known, but the fact that I encountered it will be important later.

The event after the Bowser fight was totally expected, and totally still funny anyway. Cackletta irritated me, but only because something possessed me to try doing a perfect run of Access Gate 1. Sometimes, when standing in a corner and facing the wall, the "random" lightning gives you no time to jump over the lava pit. Eventually I lucked out of that seemingly unavoidable scenario though.

Jeremy wasn't kidding, these Extras are hell compared to DT1. In DT1, I would always feel confident doing Extras as soon as they unlocked, Spire aside, and it was usually recommended to do so because the rewards far outweighed the risk. Here, though, while it's entirely possible to have the recommended hearts immediately upon unlocking the Extra Gate, the player is almost certainly not ready for what lies ahead. An0maly suggested telling the player how many areas are in each one, but I notice they tend to have 4 rooms and a boss (Gate B had a "mini boss" of sorts as well). That would still be helpful information from Jeremy beforehand, though. I expected the usual 2 rooms from DT1.

The first room felt appropriate in terms of difficulty, however, I could see that Jerry's "better" physics has excused the return of the 1-tile platforms, which forced me to use him. Trying to get used to Jerry in an Extra Gate was perhaps not the optimal experience, but it was still fun. The second room was silly, in the good way.

The third room is where everyone seems to have trouble. Mercifully, I managed to have full health for this room. The mushroom platforms in particular really annoyed me, since sometimes Jerry's breathing animation was the difference between being safe and being hit. The mushrooms could be lowered by 1 block, while keeping the center of the flails where they are, I think. It was around here that I missed that free potion, but thankfully I didn't end up needing it. The fourth room was really short, and unoffensive.

The Sacred Temple did a good job of disguising the fact that my reward wasn't really worth it, as of this point in development. The Extra Gates seem to be building up to something big, though I have several guesses what that may be, I'm sure they're all mostly wrong. An Extra Hell Dungeon with an optional boss harder than the Shroud Lord? An alternate ending? Who knows, but I'm excited for it.

Hell yes, I love this area, I love Zelda, the overworld works really well and it makes me happy. Come here, slimes! Fall before the might of my LUDICROUS KILL... wait what?

*crickets*

:(

That aside, I do love this area. Its first purpose seems to be getting the player used to the basic combat, which it does well. Finding all the items without an item finder like the one you got in Veiled Detritus in DT1 was a real challenge, but it was fun and definitely more rewarding than Extra Gate A. However, much like An0maly mentioned, the Wolf Heads were rather unnecessarily annoying due to their ability to shoot through walls. In the room with the enemy throwing hammers, trying to take my time to get past him with Wolf Heads spawning and shooting through the walls wasn't an option. I ended up tanking the hit to see what was ahead, then accidentally saved instead of restarting.

There went my perfect run... The save menu could use a confirm prompt, if you plan to have a ranking system like in DT1. Part of me kind of hopes DT3 doesn't, because it feels much more like an adventure game than a pure action platformer. Each of the games in the trilogy has their own unique flavor, and preserving that as much as possible would help keep the same core gameplay from getting stale. But I digress.

Bomb jumping needs to be improved. I spent over 20 minutes at Death Mountain trying to get those powerups. Sometimes, the bomb actually cancels Jerry's jump entirely instead of boosting it, and he then falls to his death. I'm aware that you're fixing this up a bit more as well, but this was still an issue I couldn't ignore. The down time on those bombs is also pretty long, and I'm aware that there are ways to reduce it, but those are mostly unavailable until Access Gate 2 is finished, and after that, you quickly get a new explosive that makes Link's bombs look laughably unusable by comparison.

I must be some kind of sick, twisted video game masochist (I am), because I liked the Water Temple. I'm aware that you wanted the player to make a map for themselves, but I said nuts to that and wandered around aimlessly until I stumbled into a puzzle I could do. I have a good visual memory, so it was just a matter of finding the first thing I could do and then considering what I might be able to do next. It was fun to puzzle it all out, and I ended up finding all of the upgrades here in one visit.

"You've been playing for two hours. It might be a good idea to take a break. Extended play may be hazardous to your health, or something like that. Actually, you seem to be having fun if you've been playing for that long, so go ahead and continue."

That made me giggle. And by giggle, I mean laugh so hard I fell in the same pit 4 times.

"Somehow, I knew you'd fall there."

Just as planned?

The boss made me really appreciate how unique these bosses are compared to previous titles. This game NEEDS to have an unlockable boss room. On the other hand, though, this battle made a flaw in the sound design really obvious, and that's that some of the music tracks are obscenely short and loop very obnoxiously. It's like I was expected to beat this boss in 40 seconds, or at the very least never survive long enough to hear the whole thing. By comparison, the song in the battle with Cackletta ends climatically right as you'll usually finish her off. I'm aware that this is the kind of nit-picky thing that is at the very bottom of the list of things to work on when making a game, but I had to point it out.

Shadow Jerry. That guy totally won't be used to destroy my face in an Extra Gate later on.

I once made a joke about how this area conspicuously lacks witty banter between the characters, but I'd prefer if you keep this area quiet. This area is eerie, makes you feel lost, helpless and small, and it wears away at you. The design here is really intricate and clever, and on the whole, it was about as fun as Water Temple was to me. The Tektites need fixing, though. Sometimes, due to their animation, they jump and clip into the ceiling, and yes, as An0maly pointed out, they can leave the screen entirely through the ceilings. The room with the possessed tiles was really out of nowhere and felt out of place... somehow.

The boss was a surprise, until I realized later that Extra Gate A is actually the odd one out so far by not having a boss. Anyway, when throwing bombs into the boss during the second phase, it really seems like a lot of the time, the bomb should go in, but it doesn't. The bomb sometimes slides right over the gap, so it could be a bit wider, I think. The part where the platforms disappear in particular is really obnoxious. What's also obnoxious are, as An0maly also said, the boss's arms. They were meant to be dodged with a 2.5D jump, not a horizontal 2D one. Going under them is also often not an option because of the dark sparks, which are also sometimes hard to see when not in full screen. Because of the way the arms move, at different speed and rotations, neither option for dodging them is ever consistently available, and the boss's movement seems to track you rather than stay static, which also adds to the seemingly random nature of this phase. One way I could see to resolve this is to remove the hitbox on the length of the arms when they extend, such that you still get hit by the ends of the arms if you don't avoid their strike, but while they're extended, you can jump through the length of them. This way, the player can try to manage baiting the arms to go through them on their way past the boss. As it stands in the current demo, I had to perfect the first two phases, and luck my way through this phase.

The Shroud Lord fight was well played, and was a perfect way to give him a cameo appearance. I was surprised to see the health bar regenerate to full, but I'll come back to that later. The wheel-o-lasers is irritating, since it sometimes corners you into taking a hit from the random lasers. I think bringing another one of the Shroud Lord's old attacks back instead would be a better idea, but maybe that's just me. I kinda liked the guy as he was. I think the horizontal lasers from the walls would be better suited to this battlefield, since there are already a set of higher platforms in the room.

Re-using the restore point every time I reloaded my save was irritating, since I saved after using it. I know you're trying to keep the player from farming for health with random drops, but the restore points should intuitively be an exception, at least in my opinion.

The music in the action sections here reminded me a lot of Primary Memory and The Bug. The timing on that title drop for the new chapter was perfect, and keeping the music in this area a secret until now, when you could have come here earlier, was a smart move. Feeling like a badass made me miss the Unreal Tournament Guy even more, but I understand that a fair few people found him annoying (including my room mates). I pictured a scenario in my head where Jerry complains about missing his Double Kills, then Claire chimes in about how it could be annoying. Jeremy would then point out that it's off by default this time. Maybe I'm odd for liking him.

The final part of the boss fight here really makes you panic, and I love your ability to manipulate player emotions in this game. It makes the concept of the games you plan to work on after the DT series closes very believable. The boss itself was a lesson in time management, and keeping up with the supporting enemy spawns, which becomes important in later fights. It wasn't the easiest boss, but it wasn't too hard either.

"ASMT? Oh man, that's a video game!"

Anyway, I loved this game to death during my childhood, and seeing it here was great. I like how relaxing all of the overworld areas are, but this time it was much more deceptive about it. It felt a lot like West Side Jungle from DT1. The platforming at the end before Access Gate 3 was a fun challenge. A lot of judging good timing and estimating jumps was necessary to not fall.

Puns hurt, Zephyr.

I must say, distinguishing two types of hearts when they produce the same sound effect can be really confusing. It wasn't a huge issue to sour the experience as a whole, though.

I like the increasingly complex enemy AI, and the more demanding combat scenarios. Seeing Death at the end of that hallway made me panic just like the original. It's a smart move to not actually go through with it, though. Sans nostalgia, it really isn't the best idea in terms of difficulty.

In the second half of this area, I really missed directional melee attacks. Having one direction for your physical attack worked fine for the "early Castlevania" area (for reasons that should be obvious to those who played those games), and I would argue that it's necessary to keep it at least until after you fight Dracula, but during the "later Castlevania" area, it felt really limiting, and not necessarily in a clever way. I remember reading somewhere that directional melee might still make it in, and I sincerely hope it does, but again, after the more basic melee has been introduced for a while, since Dracula would be ridiculously easy with an equivalent of the upward strike.

Access Gate 3 felt like it dragged on a little long, and by the time I'd reached Death's Flying Castle, I was so worn out that I had to quit for the day after seeing the joke about pointless fetch quests. Thankfully those weren't as bad as anticipated, but the first area I stumbled into was the battle with Menace. Given the complete lack of dialogue and the relative "abruptness" of the unexpected boss fight, my initial difficulty in finding the boss's hitbox caused me to believe that I might have wandered into a battle I couldn't win without the aforementioned fetch quest items. I eventually found the door they were used for in another room and realized I only had one direction left to go, but it was confusing at first. A bit of dialogue mentioning that Death's Heart should be somewhere in the room would be helpful. The boss himself was just about right in terms of challenge, hard enough to warrant a few tries to learn his more subtle attack cues, but easily doable and not too frustrating. It reminded me a bit of Ultimate Phalanx, but the concept much better executed.

I really liked the music in Death's Hall. It was nonthreatening in a way, but really unsettling in another. It reminded me a lot of the music in the final level of Pikmin, which I also really like for the same reasons. Baiting the crusher traps to use them as platforms was easy and fun, and the area felt like a nice break before the upcoming hell that was the boss.

Death, I will admit, is an expertly crafted boss idea, and I understand your general unwillingness to change him. On the other hand, I can also see the piles and piles of ragequit mail you're going to get because of this guy. This guy demanded both lots of skill and lots of practice from the player. One or the other simply would not cut it. From a retrospective point of view, after beating him twice, I can say that he wasn't completely ridiculous, but as I was fighting him for the first time, it felt hopelessly impossible. I made it past the sickle danmaku on roughly my first attempt, but quite a handful of latter attempts ended at the exact same place, with no mark of improvement. At some moments, I even felt doubt that I would be able to beat the final version of the game.

"You suck... actually no, that was intentionally malicious."

I don't know if that's a custom Game Over for Death's second phase, but you'd be right to assume that my first reaction was not: "oh boy, I'm happy to see this." Especially since my obsessive self was, as usual, trying to keep my death count at zero... you know where this is going, I think. I reloaded my save and I had to do the first phase again. If you know how I typically deal with situations like this, you probably also know what I did after that. Indeed, I beat both forms of Death without abusing the checkpoint/respawning pots. So on one hand, I don't hate this boss, at least not in the bad way. On the other, though, I can easily see other players, yes including raocow, fall for this trap, since saving when that "Checkpoint Reached" message appears in the middle of a room usually lets you restart from exactly there, it's entirely feasible that players would be entirely exhausted after the first phase, see the second phase for the first time, and go: "I really can't be bothered with this right now. I can restart from here, right?"

I said I'd come back to the Shroud Lord fight later, and this is where I'd like to bring it up. Like Death, Final Nightmare also had a second phase that restored the entire life bar, and he didn't have a checkpoint for that. Something about that doesn't sit right with me. Either Final Nightmare should have one, or Death should be made slightly easier so that he doesn't need one.

The first room gave a horribly bad first impression of an otherwise creative idea. The shadows tend to warp all over the place as they pass the flames, and sometimes it looks really glitchy and unfinished. I'm aware that you've made some pretty substantial changes to this area, and that it's technically among the newest content in the demo, so it looking unfinished is to be expected... but seeing it like this was highly discouraging.

The first room was a relatively harmless introduction to the gimmick, but the second room made me quit my initial run. Like An0maly, I have no idea how to dodge the lava shadows. Their very existence defies logic, and the blocky way the shadows look appears rather sloppy. It would have been fine with spikes instead, that would achieve the same trap placement and look a lot better (and do slightly less unmanageable amounts of damage, so everybody wins). In the end, instead of grinding ridiculous amounts of AP for Persistence (note this), I opted for a Miracle Fluid to cheese this room in particular.

The third room would have been fun, if it weren't for the Wallmaster's erratic movement, and its shadow's even more erratic movement. I have to micromanage all these pretty precise puzzle elements, with a random factor (my absolute favorite in games, I'm sure you know) buzzing around my ears and distracting me from the main point of the room (which by itself was a pretty good idea), while also sometimes seemingly teleporting its shadow right into mine and killing me outright without me even knowing what happened or how I was supposed to prevent it. Honestly, the Wallmaster begs to be in a speed-driven platforming segment, not a puzzle room. The enemy itself is fine, but the use of said enemy to artificially lengthen the puzzle-solving process produced irritation beyond even what I've come to expect from this series by now. I turned the game off and went to go do something else for another hour or two. Thankfully, in the end, I didn't need another Miracle Fluid for this room.

The fourth room was... actually pretty good. The shadows didn't look glitchy at all here, and behaved how I'd expect them to. I didn't spend too much time here, and once I had an idea of what was expected from me, I started having fun again. By the end of it all, though, I was too burnt out to fight the boss (I was, as raocow would say, playing like a ninny), so I had to quit for the day. What did I accomplish? Beating the first 3 rooms of Extra Gate C. That's all I accomplished in that entire afternoon's worth of gameplay... just to give an idea of how long that third room took.

Making the boss's shadow more menacing than the boss itself was a very creative idea, and I feel it was executed well. I'm glad that you removed Claire's shadow for this room, it would have ruined the fight entirely, no doubt. Something about the boss using Death's theme irked me though, like he wasn't tough enough to deserve it. Anyhow, I like how keeping cool and calmly chipping away at his health is the best option, even though the ever-growing shadow further limits your movement until you get a sense that you're running out of time. It's just an illusion, but I think that's fitting too, considering the medium.

I'm not sure I get the reference, though I feel like I should... anyway, I like the enemies' death animations. The game could work well with more customization like that. The way they look stunned and get knocked down when they die also occurs in Mickey's Magical Quest, so you could add that in to Magical Hills too and it would make sense.

The bats' behavior quirk is kind of annoying when they're in the walls. I swear I've had these guys "run for the hills" upwards of three times in a row. The crabs also change directions really abruptly, and trying to space them with Jerry is laughable. His inferiority to Claire might just be my opinion, but it feels like a running theme sometimes (are you tired of hearing "I'll come back to that later" yet? Because I will).

The Blood Tyrant is an interesting enemy, but the icon it uses in the scan data this early on might be a bit of a spoiler. ;) Or not. Anyway, something about the way it moves reminds me of a lot of fun duel battles I used to play over and over when I was a kid. Having enemies react to you, and trying to outwit those reactions, is definitely super fun. The first encounter with this guy can be kind of difficult, though... (and yes, I will come back to that again too).

Well... this place made a fantastic first impression. The music rocked ass, and the aesthetics promised a sequel to Dusty Ruins, which, say what you want about "the most common ragequit mail from DT1," like raocow, I really enjoyed the concept it put out, which was mainly maneuvering around static traps. The first few rooms delivered what I anticipated. Later rooms did not, and that's where I stopped having fun with this demo... period.

The room with the two Blood Tyrants was really over the top. Apparently, I didn't discover the "super easy" method, either, so yes, something needs to be explained better to the player. Beyond that, though, I still take some major issues with this room. First of all, here it becomes really apparent that the boulders' behavior patterns from the original game simply don't work here. In DT1, from a design perspective, they always either hit a flat surface, or the only slope they could spawn on always moved them toward you, in a logical fashion. They were single-spawn, impeding hazards that were pretty solidly executed, and generally, unless you went out of your way to go backwards through a single-exit, linear level, you wouldn't think anything odd of them. Here, it's painfully obvious they have a mind of their own, and sometimes they move in rather non-intuitive ways. I'm not just complaining about this because of difficulty, either. Sometimes, the boulders will hit the slopes, then proceed to try rolling uphill... and immediately disintegrate, because a couple pixels of "slope" hit them. The boulders really need new behavior patterns.

Secondly, yes, as An0maly pointed out, the fireballs ought to intuitively do less damage than the boulders, but I specifically take issue with the fact that I ended up dodging neither. When switching characters, sometimes I will take unavoidable damage, because of a fireball directly in front of my face, a boulder directly above or under me, or hell, even an enemy inside of me. This mostly happened to Jerry, who ended up taking the bottom path, so that's one reason I gave him the Force Armor (which I opted to get instead of Persistence). A very, very easy way to nullify just about all of the agonizingly frustrating trouble I had with this room would be a little preview. Sometimes, in a game that switches between two characters, standing still for a second or two will cause a mini-screen to pop up in the corner that shows you what's going on where the other character is. This would completely nullify all of the "unfair" difficulty I had with this room, and if further tag team rooms are going to be significantly harder than this, I will desperately need that feature in the full release if I'm to have any hope of beating the game without feeling that I've cheated it. As it stands, I did. I used another Miracle Fluid here, because of those traps that I felt I had no way of avoiding. Spoilers: It wasn't going to be the last one.

Thirdly, there was no checkpoint before the Blood Tyrant fights, of which there are two--one with each character--that you have to beat... in a row, without dying. Alright, so doing Death without a checkpoint was my own choice, so any frustration I experienced from that was my own fault... but here, there isn't even an option for less ambitious players to fall back on. You may argue that I just suck at fighting them, and I will immediately agree. Most players will just barely eke out a victory against the first Blood Tyrant and think nothing of it. Twenty minutes later, I'm beating my head against my desk, now knowing that I should have repeated that one fight over and over until I had it down pat, because already I'm expected to have to fight two of these bosses--again, that I've only ever fought once, and just barely won--in a row without dying, after a room that was pretty difficult by itself, and with both characters. If that sounds like something that the player should already be reasonably expected to do, your demographic for this game is beyond even me. And again, Jerry is hilariously inept at this compared to Claire, so I ended up with that as a second reason to give him the Force Armor. It wasn't enough. To hell with it, thought I, I wasted my other Miracle Fluid without a care in the world. Little did I know it would get worse.

Finally, the next room, and... (sigh)... it's another Blood Tyrant fight... this time with boulders. Seriously? Traps in the boss room used to be Distorted Mode exclusive... Thankfully it's only one Blood Tyrant again, and there are respawning pots outside the door. Honestly, if there weren't, I probably would have ragequit right here, and this would be the end of the review. My (perhaps much wiser than I) friend already ragequit before even reaching the tag team Blood Tyrant part, he got stuck on the boulders. When I told him about it, at first he thought I was joking.

The joke about the item at the end giving you no new ability, and the tutorial window about it being completely worthless, were both funny in hindsight, but as you can probably understand, I was not in the mood to appreciate it. I already knew where to go, so I went directly to the next area, determined to finish this dungeon so I could wash my palate of it the next morning and forget it ever happened, lest my impression of everything else I play after it be completely unfair.

The underwater area was also overly frustrating, and I walked right out and bought two more Miracle Fluids, both of which I ended up using, perhaps unnecessarily, but I was beyond caring about fair play at this point. I knew I was near the end of the demo, and just wanted it done with. Going out to get more supplies was also annoying, since Begonia is pretty large and has only one warp tablet. It could use another one outside the Mountain Temple. I know why there isn't one there, but I also know you have the programming know-how to disable it for that one avalanche sequence.

The underwater fans and those exploding mines made me feel less like I was playing a game than fighting to keep a screaming child still for an injection. And then the nurse accidentally ends up giving it to me instead. In my opinion, the mines should explode on contact, not on a proximity-triggered timer. Several times, because of the way the mines move up and down in the water, even when I avoided the mines themselves, the explosions would still hit me while falling down the shafts, which will almost always lead to getting hit by the one below it, and so on, and 2 1/2 hearts of damage for each one during all of that is rather cruel. Some of the jumps with the fans also got really frustrating, because some actions the player needs to perform to get past them didn't feel as intuitive. All together, this area made all the optional health upgrades I'd collected so far feel far more like they were necessary, rather than the optional insurance they had been before, which even Death and the double Blood Tyrant room never managed to do.

An underwater tag team room... yup, I quit here for the day. Thankfully it didn't turn out to be that bad, sans the slightly ridiculous fireball spam in the upper right corner. Because fireballs underwater totally make sense. They couldn't have been, I dunno, really hot water or something? Or if you're not satisfied with a mere color swap, how about darts? Whatever. At least I had the privilege to nitpick this time. This room was another case of "it would be fun to puzzle out, if I didn't have to worry about dying to one particular hazard quite so much."

After all that hell, the boss was literally so easy that I beat it in 3 attempts, only the third of which I actually felt that I really knew what I was doing. After the basic traps started dealing over 2 hearts of damage, I was surprised to see how much room for error I suddenly had. The "MASH BUTTONS!!" sequence at the end made me laugh, and would have been a great way to release some frustration after all that nonsense before, so of course I screw up the timing of that by quitting for the day when I was almost at the end. Oh well. I hope the "MASH BUTTONS!!" combo makes it in to the boss room too. I forget if there was a hit counter, if not, you should totally put that in. Overall, as the first boss where you can switch characters, it does its job well, even if it wasn't all too difficult for me, I can imagine it would be if you tried to beat it with only one of the two characters.

The virus boss was pretty much a non-issue due to the lift you get from hitting an enemy in midair. He never even got close enough to X to be on the same screen as him. For once, though, Jerry felt better than Claire for something, so I used him instead. Maybe if I'd stuck with Claire, I could have killed the Wasp Bots with Holy Water, but I don't think you're supposed to anyway.

The intro to the MMX area does what it sets out to do. My only complaint would be about a particular jump off of a pillar to stand on top of it, and the spikes make you really claustrophobic. But then I realized that same exact jump was in Doppler Fortress 1, and that this level even uses the same exact graphics. As a MMX fan, I stopped caring about that, but that's probably just bias due to nostalgia. It could probably use just 1 more block of let... probably. Maybe.

The boss gave me way more trouble than it should have, but I was probably just exhausted by the whole post-Death section of the demo. I'm still not sure why the X Buster needs an ammo limit here. I know it could fall under the category of "game-breaking" outside of the MMX Gate, but like the wall jump, it feels like, for just this area, rapid-fire should be permitted without consequence.

I've seen the "played for two hours" message scroll by at least three times now. You bet your ass this game is fun, especially in the older areas that have had more iterations and chances to be polished. It aims to be bigger and better than DT1, and I hope the full release can be. I've more than once read that DT3 is "going to be what DT should have been." I wouldn't want you to think that DT1 wasn't a good game, but whatever M.O. you're working with, it's working well.

The things I'd most like to see make a return in the final release would include the return of directional attacks, a bigger, badder boss room, and for the love of Ludicrous Kill, the Unreal Tournament Guy. I think raocow would miss him too.

As for some new things I'd like to see, I've noticed that the Access Gates feel very much like smaller games of their own. Some of them have really unique flavor, and you can roll with that idea a bit further. You could customize the current, generic Game Over screen in each Gate, to parody the originals. For instance, in the Zelda 2 area, I could see "GAME OVER, RETURN OF GANON" as "GAME OVER, CORRUPTING SYSTEM FILES..." or something similar. In the Mario Gate, when you die, you could get knocked off the level first instead of just immediately vanishing in static. In the Castlevania Gate, Claire could collapse, and the familiar death sound would play. Things like that would add charm to a game that so far, just in my opinion, takes itself just a little bit too seriously sometimes. Being funny worked for the original, and the game seems to be lacking in witty banter sometimes, compared to DT1. Extra Gates being acceptable exceptions, since the player wouldn't want to be distracted, and it worked well for the atmosphere in Extra Gate B.

If there's one major thing I don't like that I would want fixed, it's the upgrade system. Now, a lot of people complain that the upgrades are insubstantial, but I honestly don't see it with some of them. The Emerald Tiara, for example, when you crunch all the numbers, if it's making a difference between green and blue internetz drops, you get a 20% boost in efficiency, which cuts your grinding time considerably. Two extra points of damage might not seem like a lot, but often, the enemies would just barely survive your normal attack strength, and the extra points can make a big difference on the time needed to kill the enemies, whilst not being too much and breaking the boss fights. I once upgraded the speed of Claire's hair whip, and I immediately noticed the difference. The upgrades are helpful enough, but the prices are overinflated. I understand the decision to force the player to choose, but at this rate, by the end of the final version of the game, the game will suffer from post-game grinding for all the completionists out there (myself obviously included in this category, if you've even glanced at my YouTube channel). DT1 had a hilariously broken farming trick, and DT2 started you off with a maxed out character, and compensated by being the harder game (compared to Normal Mode on DT1, at least). This game takes the worst combination by being the harder game and having a leveling system with no apparent farming trick available as of yet. You've said that DT1 had no idea what it wanted to be during development, but what it certainly wasn't was a grindfest. DT3 shouldn't be, either.

The game as it stands now is extremely fun, however, and sometimes it's almost too much fun. I often forget to scan the enemies, so the idea that's been thrown around of collecting permanent scan data into a collection appeals to me, as long as the bosses and other one-time encounters are automatic if you forget to scan them, which is especially easy to do if you die.

The biggest issue I had with the later areas of this demo is the sheer difficulty, and lack of options to ease off it. In the first game, you had a lot of options to "learn the game," basically, to get a grasp of what you're expected to do for each area. You could use items to tank hits, you could use Rave Mode, you could turn the difficulty down to Beginner. I found myself taking advantage of that whenever I needed to learn stuff. raocow said something about that during the Shroud Lord fight, that Beginner actually lets you learn stuff, you know, like a beginner. Honestly, sometimes this game feels like it starts out shoving Distorted Mode in your face. It's already as hard and as easy as it will ever be, and in this game in particular, some sections are not as intuitive as the earlier games, and the game ends up feeling outright hostile to new players. Doing a blind run felt utterly hopeless at some points, particularly the battle with Death and the Mountain Temple. If the player had the opportunity to fight Death on an easier mode, then switch back to whatever they fancy for the real fight, it would help keep the fight challenging without forbidding the player from making the mistakes they're inevitably going to make on their first run through the game. It makes all the difference between "I can't beat this boss" and "I can beat this boss, but I know I can do better." Options like that are important, and if you don't have them, a lot of people who are, in theory, good enough to beat the game, will end up quitting before they can reach that, due to sheer frustration. Difficulty and frustration are separate entities, and having fun while trying to pull off a difficult challenge is the ideal balance, unless the way you blow off steam every afternoon is just to get mad at games instead of people.

That's what I have, as of the 2.1 demo.

Thanks a lot for the very detailed anreview. I really appreciate it and so does Zephyr.
I won't go into a fully detailed answer but I might comment on a few things you said.
The game starts out pretty easy (well as easy as it gets these days ) and introduces you to the gameplay with some easier scenarios, especially Gate 1 and Gate 2 as well as the first two overworld areas. It is here that you get used to the general controls and learn how to play this game right. Once you reach Gate 3 though things start to get rough. As of Gate 3 let me tell you that I think it has the perfect length. I never was at a point where I said that I feal it's worn out. Plus keep in mind that it is just as big and complex as Gate 2. ;) I think it depends on which games you like and on which you don't like. You love Zelda, so you don't mind a long experience in this Gate while Castlevania might not be your favourite game. But this way everyone might have the chance to at least play one Gate that he really likes for a while.
Death will not change. He remains the hard, "wake-up" boss he currently is. He is supposed to teach you how to fight and react properly in a duel based fight. But after you defeat him you feel so much more skilled and prepared for later bosses which will push the difficuly even further. ;)
Claire's whip attack won't be directional. The reason the game does not use directional attacks is simple: It has all kind of different ability sets and each and every ability set provides its own unique attacks. In later situations you need to switch between said attacks and thus think which attack or ability works best for whichever situation you are confronted with. For exampe there might be a puzzle similiar to some Gate 2 situations where you need to hit a certain switch above you. In this occasion it might be best to use arrows. Now if you hadd a directional attack you could simply meleee the switch with an upward strike.
So there's a reason why each attack and ability is somewhat limited. It requires you to use different attacks in different situations. Whcih is a good thing in my oppinion...
Prices for updates are subject to change as the game development progresses. It will truely be balanced after the game is completed cause by this point all items like treasure chests are placed at their rightful positions and thus Zephyr can decide weather certain items are too expensive or not.
Oh as with AP that you need in order to level your skills and abilities like the speed of melee attacks there's a new power-up that can be found on the overowrld. It will give you a certain amount of ability points. So there's no need for grinding thanks to these new power-ups which underline the exploration gameplay of this game even further.
The room with the two Tyrants is subject to change since it actually requires too much at this point. et there is an easy way to stop bullets by deflecting them with the Bubble Shield that is around a passive character. The underwater section will hopefully not change since I think it is one of the best designed areas in this game so far. I really don't mind the mines. Sure they are a bit tricky but that#s part of their function. What might be done though is adding more healing pots in the first 2 rooms of the underwater area of the temple.
I guess Gate C won't be changed either sicne it has already undergone massive changes and is at a state where it is playable and beatable without being too frustrating. Also, wait till you get to play Gate D.

Extra Gate A
The 3rd room had been altered a bit, some of it to help that 'breathing' out. When I had recently played all of the game from chapters 1-8, that happened to me so... yeah.

Access Gate 2
"The save menu could use a confirm prompt, if you plan to have a ranking system like in DT1."
There is no ranking system planned for DT3.

The bomb boost is another one of those on-going things. I actually can't remember if that demo has the old method or if it was fixed up a bit more after that. On that explosive by Claire, the Holy Water may not have that explosive element later. If that's changed, quite a few things in Gate 3 will change with it. It's being discussed at the moment. (It probably won't change, but it is on the plate.)

"Somehow, I knew you'd fall there."
I fell there by accident on two seperate occasions, even knowing the pit is there. Having a pit only a few tiles away from the starting point is not a good idea, but in this instance, it was played on instead of changed. If you see little nuances in the game like this, it's often due to something that happened during development.
For instance, in the Begonia Temple's water split party map, Slaix managed to get Jerry stuck right at the end when Claire dropped off a pressure switch. Since you need Jerry to get back up there, Jerry was stuck indefinitely. In response to that, if you get either Jerry or Claire stuck in there, the other will poke fun at the one getting stuck and Jeremy will 'fix' it for you so you don't have to restart the map.
There's an oddity in Chapter 1 where you can abuse the save system to cheat by something. Again, Jeremy 'fixes' it.

On the boss room, it will definitely have that. Probably in Central City, so the player will be able to replay any boss they've seen up to that point.

Shh, no one must know the secret of Shadow Jerry.

Extra Gate B
The possessed tiles are from Link to the Past, though I kinda see what you mean with them feeling out of place. During my playthrough, they felt a bit odd, so it's one of the things I'll be reworking later. Mostly the timing and sequence itself.

"Re-using the restore point every time I reloaded my save was irritating, since I saved after using it."
Very good point, this has been changed.

Central City
"The final part of the boss fight here really makes you panic, and I love your ability to manipulate player emotions in this game."
That wasn't intentional, but I'll keep that noted. You're not the first to say that about DT3.

Overworld 2 - Magical Hills
Nearly all the overworld areas have this kind of feel to them. Not all of them will, but all the pre-midgame areas do.

Access Gate 3
Slaix said the same thing about heart pieces and hearts. It does seem that a different sound is necessary for the heart energy.

"Access Gate 3 felt like it dragged on a little long"
This is something I've experienced with it as well. Will have to phish for how others feel about that aspect sometime. As for Menace, I'll have something for that so others don't feel that same confusion. That makes a lot of sense.

Extra Gate C
It has had a lot of changes, mostly to room 3 and 4. That last bit with the jumper pads in room 4 is way more fluid, and a platform close to the beginning was added. Room 3 isn't a total disaster, just a minor one now. Even now, the whole level still feels wrong though. It's one of the few levels where I go "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck, why can't you just stop breaking?"

One thing that could make the shadows not so jumpy would be to have shadow casting from multiple sources, but that created a functional and visual mess as expected. Having them cast by the closest flame was the alternative for me, but does create that nasty jumpy effect. A question to you, do you think the level design should be set up around this more so that it has less of a chance or none at all to happen? I'm trying to think of a way to make that level better without having to scrap it completely. Redesigning some of it seems like the better choice.

Oh yeah, just now took out the lava... those poor Podobos no longer have a home. YOU KILLED THEM, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!! For every lava pit removed, a Podobo loses its home. Please think of the Podobos. :[

Overworld 3 - Begonia
"The Blood Tyrant is an interesting enemy, but the icon it uses in the scan data this early on might be a bit of a spoiler. ;) Or not."
Thinking it to be a spoiler might be exactly what I want you to think.

I can see why you like to use Claire because of her range. The crabs were made awkward just for her. For the Tyrants, I prefer to use Jerry, and that was even before his bomb was made more useful.

Mountain Temple
It looks like this needs a lot of reworking. It's gotten a bit since that demo, but there's still some changes that need to be made it seems. One thing I already know I'm going to remove is one of the Tyrants in the first split room, then replace him with getting pinned in by 2 or 3 much weaker enemies. Jeremy mentions in the beginning of that room that there are two Tyrants around, so I'll rework the dialogue for that. The Tyrant with the rocks... I'm keeping that, but will reduce the rock spawning rate substantially.

The water area has been reworked, especially the split room. Though I'll be redoing a few more things I can see. The split map had that top-right zone with the traps redone a few test builds ago. After my full playthrough, I agree that the platforming in the water area felt dodgy. The problem was it required too much pixel precision so that was changed. As Anomally said about the fan pushing you through the spike hallway, that was fixed up so it doesn't feel like the game hates you.

Access Gate 4
The ammo limit will stay, even for the gate itself. It comes into play later and isn't even a thing after your first special weapon.

Stuff
Yeah, I want the Unreal guy back too. He'll be off by default. I'm wondering if I should add a clause that keeps him from coming up when curb, err Mario stomping enemies... hmm, that could be rather humorous looking/sounding.

The music looping will be done at the very end of the project. For now, I'm okay with it having that awkward moment.

I really like the idea of the minimap coming up if you stand idle for a moment. That just may make its way in. Game Maker has features to support such things. The game has things in place that keep sprites from being drawn offscreen, but I can find a workable solution for that if I try this feature out.

I really like that you're having fun with the demo, and knowing that someone saw the 2 hour warning more than once is pretty nifty. If you can pinpoint it, what about the game made it fun? Where were you having the most fun with the game?
For instance, one aspect that I really like in adventure games is exploring and finding stuff. Super Metroid (and the Prime series) are my favorite examples of this and I really wanted to bring that into DT3. Is the exploration aspect a major part of the fun for you?

For the AP requirements, that along with the cost of items will be changed as the project moves on. As you said though, I like the idea of having the player need to make choices on which would be the best skill for them at the time. There is a new overworld exclusive pickup that gives AP now. There's quite a few of them too.

I am worried. :( I am worried that too many things in the game get toned down. Let me explain this as I list single elements:

1.) Access Gate 3 length:
I would be very disappointed to see Gate 3 being shortened. Sure, it is long, but it is just as long as Gate 2 and 4. And as I said the way you feel about the length of a specific Gate depends if you like the series of games it is based on or not. I am a huge fan of the CV games and thus I have tons of fun whenever I play through Gate 3.
Thus I strongly suggest to keep the length. It takes you around 2 hours to complete this Gate, just like it does with Gate 2 and Gate 4.

2.) Holy Water:
Er, I agree with you on that DarkYoshi, it should stay as it is. It works fine for me and I never had any issues with the Holy Water. Also changing many parts of Gate 3 because of that would be superfluous in my oppinion since Gate 3 already is pretty dang good as it is.

3.) Begonia Temple:
I agree that the third room of the temple should be toned down. But not by deleting the Tyrant. That was the fun, the special part of this room. Also Tyrants are really not that bad to fight. I'd say delete some of the traps, tone it down a bit, but the Tyrant itself should stay.

To be honest, I could see the difficulty increase in Gate 3, but I didn't mind it, because to me, it felt more polished, and I had more fun here as a result. After backtracking for hidden items, I realize that once you've figured out what you're doing and where you're going, it isn't nearly as long as it looked during a blind run. First impressions aren't the most accurate, which is why I didn't want to give feedback until a few days after I'd finished the demo. If I'd given more Twitter-esque feedback, 90% of it would be garbage (pretty much like most actual tweets).

Death, as a concept, I don't want changed. Making staying toe-to-toe with the Grim Reaper a vital strategy was brilliantly executed, and honestly, I'm tired of some games making Death Incarnate such a pansy. Still, without an easier difficulty to fall back on for practice, the only way through was to stubbornly suck it down and die about 50 times, and probably many, many more for people who aren't fans of the DT series as a whole. Most of those such players will almost certainly quit at this boss if the single difficulty mode remains standard in the final version.

All the abilities being limited might not be a problem in the final version of the game, but in the demo, you can only get one ability set per character, and most of the time, one or the other character is unavailable. The only time I could really see the sense in that decision was against the boss of Mountain Temple, where being able to switch during bosses was first introduced. Later bosses fought with two characters will be harder, but this is the only one currently available in beta. You alpha testers have links to everything but Zephyr's actual brain at your fingertips, but those of us limited to beta don't know what the hell sometimes. :P

The new powerup reminds me of the bags of EXP in Zelda 2, and it seems like a great way to tackle the grinding problem. If leveling up is based entirely on exploration and completing challenges (much like the Spire gave you EXP in DT1), I'm more than fine with that.

I did try to take advantage of the Water Barrier around inactive characters, and I even tried taking advantage of the boulders' odd behavior to use Claire to distract them from where Jerry was standing at times. That helped make things slightly manageable, but the blind switching still felt like it shouldn't have been part of the challenge. As for the mine explosions hitting me as I fall, even when I dodged the mines themselves, I figured out where that was happening and what I was doing wrong, so their behavior is fine in hindsight.

My comments on the underwater mines' damage still stand, though. Even with the maximum possible hearts at this point, they still kill you in 4 hits. The only equivalent damage in DT1 is the color wheels, and only on Distorted will they kill you that quickly, and even then, it was only in one particular room (need I even name it?) that they were really the main threat, and I'm sure you remember how cheap that room felt your first time through it, and I can bet it probably wasn't on Distorted. Again, the challenge itself would be fine on its own if the player had more options to learn it without being frustrated into submission. After the traps were doing that much damage, again, I was thrown off by how many mistakes I was suddenly allowed to make against the boss.

Zephyr told me via email that he almost wanted to tell me to ignore Gate C, and I almost did skip out on giving feedback on that one, but since I ended up playing it anyway out of curiosity for the boss, and I liked said boss, I wanted to put that out there. Not all of the demo version of Gate C felt quite so unfinished as others, and I didn't think the whole thing necessarily had to be scrapped.

I already know what's in Gate D, since an unused track in the music folder spoiled it for me. That game doesn't scare me nearly as much as it would most people. ;)

I did every Extra Gate as soon as it appeared, so I'm not sure what the player would think or what their experience would be like if they skipped the Extra Gates and went back to them as if they were endgame content. When a demo that's further along in the story comes out, I'll probably try that out just to see if anything special happens to keep you from completely cheesing everything. I'm genuinely curious about that.

As I said before, I'm in favor of not having a ranking system for this one. DT3 has its own way of doing things, and it doesn't intuitively feel like a game that would have one. The levels aren't "get from A to B" (unless you're talking Extra Gates), they're more like smaller games. An overall ranking system for the whole thing wouldn't really fit.

I think, as of the 2.1 demo, bomb jumping had improved since earlier versions, but you were still working on it from what I remember. As for the Holy Water, having the Holy Water act as two different elements depending on how you used it felt like part of the strategy in Gate 3. Removing one or the other would actually detract from that. Trying to make sure the Holy Water itself hit some enemies, and the floor in front of other enemies, made you feel like you'd mastered using it, which was pretty nifty.

Oh man, now I get the feeling I'm just missing a lot of the wit that I complained didn't seem to be there. I really have no idea what you're talking about in Chapter 1, though. I think it has something to do with the keys, maybe there's a way to duplicate them, or avoid using some? But that's just a wild-ass guess.

The boss room idea makes me happy, especially that you plan to make each boss unlockable instead of just saving them all for the end. How will you handle playing older bosses with new ability sets? Will that be an option, or will you be limited to the original ability sets? Fighting older bosses with newer abilities seems like it might be fun to play around with, especially if time trials become a thing.

I tried scanning Shadow Jerry during the cutscene, but alas, you're smarter than that. :P The whole cutscene smelled of "I am WAY too awesome to fight right now, you'll have to wait, loser with 4 hearts."

I knew where the possessed tiles were from (I actually called Link's Awakening, but the games are pretty similar). It's one of the things I might have expected to be in DT3, but if anything, I expected traps, not a mini boss.

I'm glad that restore point thing has been fixed. I'd keep the whole "saving after getting random health drops doesn't work" thing though. I'd also like to point out that that trick currently DOES work on arrow drops, though that might be intentional.

The central city boss thing might not have been intentional, but it works. One thing DT1 and DT2 didn't have was desperation attacks. They had scripted "super attacks," but most of them didn't really do anything unique when they were close to death. So far, all of the major bosses in DT3 change pretty drastically throughout the whole fight, but even the central city boss has something unique going for him during the final bit, which is what makes a lot of the bosses in this game so much fun.

The sound effects for the different hearts being the same was particularly confusing in Gate 3, but that also falls under the whole thing about the Gates being more customized. Link's arrows and especially the MMX health drops also have the same sound effect, which makes even less sense.

Looking back at Menace, directional melee attacks seemed like they would break him too, not just Dracula. Then I looked back at Blackmoor, and wondered, "what boss WOULDN'T be broken by upward strike," and the answer was, "anything shorter than Dracula." Really, the "missing directional melee" thing only came up in the room with the dash boots, particularly going up and down the stairs. The bosses in this game have a ton less health than in DT1, so I really don't know what train of thought ended with "directional melee would be really nice right about now." I'm a fool, pay no attention to me.

Gate C is a concept I'd still like to see in the final version. I thought it was really unique, just that it needed to be improved. One reason I think the shadows worked so well in the fourth room is that there weren't so many flames quite as close to each other as before, which led to the whole "behaving how I'd expect them to" thing. Redesigning Gate C around this like you said is how I'd handle it too.

This is why the Podoboos attacked me on the bridge in Gate 2, you see. They're clairvoyant, that's how they know when to strike. They knew that I was their destructor, and they had to defend their brothers. They knew.

"I know you think it's H____, so I'm deceiving you" is also a possibility I've considered, since the obvious culprit is almost too obvious if you pay attention to everything. It does make an astounding amount of sense though, especially if you consider another possibility with regards to why certain characters can see stuff others can't. My alternative theory also makes sense with what Bob the Wise Whale said, and it could even tie in with the first one. I won't go too deep into it though, since the talkhaus doesn't like spoilers in spoilers.

Adding that preview window will help make things in the double Tyrant room significantly easier already, so that would be pretty nifty. Reworking the underwater section is appreciated too. Some parts weren't even really hard, just annoying to make certain jumps. The tail end of the second room in particular just seemed like a time-waster.

The ammo limit in Gate 4 is another thing I'm sure will make sense in the long run, but the demo is limited, so I can only offer that perspective.

I really didn't expect the Unreal Guy to say anything when stomping on Mario enemies, so that would make sense to me. I like the concept of Jerry complaining and Claire arguing with him about it though. The player would need to be made aware if it's off by default, since it was on by default in DT1 and DT2.

If the minimap in the tag team segments is the only thing I suggested that makes its way in, I'd consider my feedback a success. :P

The exploration was definitely a huge part of the fun, and incorporating rewards of AP into that will only enhance it further. Finding new things was always a joy, and nothing ever felt too obscure to the point of Guide Dang It. Even the ones that might seem like it if you discovered it by accident had clues somewhere.

Another major source of fun was the bosses, and yes, I mean Death too. Each of them is much more complex and involved than any of the bosses in DT1 and DT2 could have ever aspired to be, except maybe the Shroud Lord and The Artist (incidentally, my favorite bosses in that game).

The other major thing that I wanted your opinion on is bringing back multiple difficulty levels, particularly an easier one for first-time players. You told raocow sometime during the whole Shroud Lord thing that the Beginner setting exists for a reason, and I'm not sure why that reason no longer applies when DT3 is shaping up to be harder than DT1 in the end. You mentioned that having multiple difficulty settings just over-complicated things and that DT1's level design should have simply been based around Veteran. I understand having different trap layouts on each difficulty setting being entirely too much work to do, especially with DT3 as it is going to be a larger, longer game. DT3 is more of an adventure game than a straightforward action platformer, and even moreso than before it feels like it needs an option to help teach the player through it's design on a blind run. Even without over-complicating the thing by changing the level layout, the damage could still be adjusted. Without the choice in difficulty, you can't really raise the difficulty above the bar DT1 and DT2 set without completely shutting out the players who can't top that, and you can't tone things down globally to make it accessible without your hardcore audience complaining about it, because they can't turn the difficulty back up to suit their preference. Toning down DT1 and people complaining about it was the whole reason Distorted exists, after all.

The red outline tile was added. There's a few other spots above the shot where this was done in the vertical shaft. The platforming there was definitely too precise. It was all doable, but from a player's first moments with these, that was just too frustrating.
Fun bonus, before the testers got the level, those green outlined spots were not there. It was still possible, but required far FAR too much precision.

By performing certain shenanigans, you can get this heart. The intended method is to wait for the air dash, but like with DT1, I like having things just barely out of reach unless the player understands deeper mechanics.

I don't think I have to list the clues supporting my theory, since I'm pretty certain you put them there on purpose. It makes sense going all the way back to when he was first introduced. I'm expecting it, but at the same time, I'm expecting it in an unusual way, which is pretty "out there," but it would explain some other oddities exclusive to DT2 and a bit of DT3 as well. Jeremy, for one, seems to already have his own idea about what's up, he's acting a lot like he did near the beginning of Distortion Reckoning, but perhaps a bit more... afraid? He seems to feel partially responsible for something, because his responses to questioning these days are kind of shifty.

(I'm not entirely blind; I downloaded DT1 recently, and beat the Flame Instigator before recoiling in horror at how unintuitive the air-dash seemed to my poor, stubby little fingers. I haven't actually found anything in the game that frustrates me yet; probably the most annoying thing was that section in the first distortion where you ride the top platform across the screen and then another one back, all for some internetz that I would have been perfectly happy to grind for in my own time. But even that was pretty fun, and an exercise in controlling Jerry when he's off the screen. But then again, I haven't been playing long, and things are less frustrating when you've died 200~ times over the course of the game compared with when you've died that much in the course of a room.)

Gate One is a pretty interesting start to the game. Not being able to attack, other than the Mario stomp, is a very interesting change from DT 1. It makes you feel a little defenseless, since Jerry feels bigger and less mobile than Mario did, meaning it's more difficult to follow the traditional Mario route of getting around your enemies rather than dealing with them.

Hammer Bro's fortress is...eh. I really enjoyed the Thwomp hallway where the platforms crumble into the lava; being able to move at speed through it was a pleasure. I had less fun on the way back, due to different Thwomp speeds, but it was still doable. All in all, a nice little intro.

Cackletta's Fortress, on the other hand...well, I'm still in it. I've gotten to the teleporter, and stopped playing because the two hour warning came up, and I'd been playing long enough that I was making silly mistakes. The two rooms before the teleporter are just...wow. The room with the long bridge (I was playing fullscreen, so I can't tell you the room number) presented a dilemna to me as a player, mainly centred around those Podoboos. As a guy who thinks slightly about these things sometimes, I get what you were doing. Pyschologically, the Podoboos change the entire room and make it a balancing act. You want to go slow so you can scout out the Podoboos, but the maces and the enemies make you want to hurry up and get out of danger. In addition, because you're making use of the Mario stomp, the temptation is to play it like a Mario game; many times I got hit and tried to rush ahead prematurely, forgetting that mercy invincibility is far shorter than it was in the Marioes. So, intellectually, I get it. I get that room, I get that it was well designed and thought out (otherwise the Podoboos wouldn't be in exactly the places I, as a player, instinctually wanted to put myself), and I get the reasoning.

Emotionally, however, I found myself wondering why the Podoboos took off quite so much health AND were proximity sensitive. The trick with the Mario games is that Podoboos happen whether you're near them or not; if you find a safe spot, you can observe, and prepare yourself. Because Podoboos in this game trigger only when Jerry draws near (close enough that if you're running or jumping in that direction, you're probably going to get hit), I sometimes felt like I was simply being punished for not knowing the room in advance, because I didn't have any way of knowing where the Podoboos would be, and because of the maces, didn't feel inclined to inch my way through the room finding out. There was also the high damage factor of the things; since they took away two of my starting three health, it felt like I was being punished harshly for my lack of foreknowledge. Overall, I get the room, and why it is the way it is, but as a less-than-spectacular player, I can attest that it was definitely harder than anything that came before it. Still, came with a rush when I finally got through, so all's fair. At least I learned how to bait and jump under a fast-falling Thwomp at the beginning of the room!

The next room, the autoscroll room, got a cheap kill on me because I misinterpreted the camera movement and thought it was leading into a cutscreen. After the difficulty of the last room, I 'felt' like one was due. But nope; autoscroll, and I died without even taking a step. After that, the room wasn't that bad; I got the piece of heart easy enough after a few tries, and anything else was just screwups where I couldn't quite land on one of the goombas in the area where you need to enemy-jump up to the switch in order to proceed. Still, I died quite a bit, just in the process of learning the level. After those two rooms, I felt like I'd effectively been noob-wall'd; that they were essentially the bar that said, 'You must be this big enough and ugly enough to play DT3. Of course, it's more like, 'You must be this good at Mario style platforming to play this completely unrelated game called DT3 which just so happens to be borrowing the mechanics for a while'. Good times. I stopped there due to two things: the two-hour warning, and the fact that I have absolutely no idea how to get up that Thwomp staircase.

Overall, my impressions so far are that it's fun, but I worry about the pacing. I played 2 hours and died nearly 200 times, and we're yet to even get 'real' attacks. I also don't really get why Claire is a thing at this point in time; to my naive playstyle, she just seems like a worse controlling Jerry with little to no advantages. It feels weird to have a character switch button and yet have no reason to use it. I imagine that'll change when the attacks get unlocked and they diverge in terms of gameplay, but for this first Mario segment it seems like Claire is a liability. (Also, I don't get why she was disallowed on the bridge room; thus far, I haven't spotted any behavior she might have which would break that room. It just kinda felt like, 'I am the game, and I'm taking away your option to use this character for...well, basically, to be a bit of a dick. Welcome to Distorted Travestey, fool.') But, overall, I'm enjoying it, and will play more tomorrow.

(On a very small sidenote: in the shop with the two toad brothers, Jeremy mentioned that if I bought a bottle, the guy would fill it for free. I bought the bottle, and then bought a helping of red potion imagining that I wouldn't get charged, but it still took my internetz. I was just wondering if I was supposed to exit out instead of buying the potion and then he'd give it to me sans charge.)

After a tiny bit of rest, I cracked the mysterious case of the Thwomp Stairs and moved on to Cackletta. Knowing from raocow's lps that bosses are a bit of a thing in the DT series, I was expecting the worst, but was pleasantly surprised. Even though she's the first (and probably easiest) boss, I was still surprised by how non-threatening Cackletta manages to be. Her attack patterns don't call for very much movement at all, so you always feel in control since you can essentially spot dodge. In particular, her attack where she shoots fire into the sky and lets it rain down is almost sad in how unlikely it is to hit you if you, say, stand still. Still, I liked the difficulty this boss is set at; even though it's a simple fight, screwing up your execution will still land you in hot water, particularly on the last phase. Being the platforming idiot that I am, I experienced it more than a few times. In this fight, I particularly like the small random element to some of her later lightning sweeps; it keeps the player on their toes without being overtly threatening. Quite an enjoyable first boss. I've decided to skip the optional Mario area for now and come back when I've either got some real attacks or gotten some health.

After spending so long without 'real' attacks (I totally do not count the Mario stomp as a reliable way of dealing with enemies in this context), it was a joy and a relief to finally get a skillset at the start of this gate. Perhaps because of the change in gameplay (more Zelda-esque exploration and collecting rather than Mario style bouncing on heads), and perhaps because I could actually kill stuff without deliberately risking collision damage, I found this gate much easier on the whole than Gate One. In general terms, I was impressed at how well put together the Zelda section is in terms of ability integration; there's almost always a way you can out-range your enemies with either bombs or arrows and avoid risking damage. To be honest, I'm expecting that facet to be stronger here and in the next gate in comparison to the rest of the game, simply because you're limited to either Jerry or Claire, so the obstacles only have to account for one character's set of skills. It really started to show the 'The Player always has the tools necessary' mindset that the dev comments on the enemies had been referencing up to now.

On a personal note, I was also happy to learn about the way weapons and skills 'upgrade' through repeated use. Seeing Cowrao's playthrough of DT 2, one of the things I didn't like (on a personal level, so feel free to ignore everything I'm saying) was how the damage remained static throughout the entire game. I mean, I know it's something most games in the action genre do (Megaman is the series that comes to mind), but a battle system feels more depthy when it includes attacks which change and develop throughout instead of staying at the same value. On a side note, since I haven't commented on it yet: the menu screens are much nicer aesthetically than in DT1, and far easier to get around. The importance of a convinient user interface in a game like this can hardly be overstated.

I suppose the main focal point of the Zelda section is the Water Temple, so I guess I'll go into detail on that. I was amused to read in one of the monster scans that the game was seeking to recreate the 'headaches' of the OoT Water Temple; as somebody who actually enjoyed that temple quite a bit, I felt right at home in the DT3 version. It was a section where I felt like the metroidvania vibe was strong, and I spent a happy couple of hours just messing around with the water levels and getting all the stuff I could. One thing I should note is that I felt on two seperate occasions that I might have 'broken' or found alternate solutions to puzzles; I got the feeling that they might have been the intended solutions, but I wasn't able to say for sure. The first involved bomb jumping over a ledge that supposedly needed a higher water level to be cleared, and the second involved the very last room before the boss with the two rocks, which I felt I cheesed somehow since I didn't use the rocks' abilites to hold platforms or stick to the bottom of each other as was mentioned in the signs. Again, I might be wrong. Overall, I really enjoyed the Zelda section; it felt fair, well balanced, well designed, and generally solid.

Not gonna lie, even though the enemy scan said it was supposed to be the first challenging boss, I found it easier than Cackletta. I got a little ticked off that the boss could shoot me from offscreen whilst when I tried to shoot him back, my arrows mysteriously impaled themself on the magic barrier of screen perspective, but that's a very minor complaint. I feel like the real difficulty in that fight comes from the little energy balls from the body rather than the larger ones; the large ones are easy to read and telegraph themselves well, but the little ones are more random and sometimes hard to notice when attempting to not be impaled by the ceiling. I was initially somewhat surprised by the decision to effectively discount bombs throughout the entire boss fight, though; seeing as bombs constitute an entire 1/3rd of your arsenal at that point, it feels like an odd decision to take them away. Mind you, it IS a Zelda segment, and Zelda boss battles traditionally only use your sword/arrows and whatever items you've picked up in that particular dungeon, so I guess it's not out of place. Overall, a pretty nice boss fight.

...Actually, I'm going to go on a little about the next 'segment', even though it's not really a gate. I'm talking about the Control Center. Now, I've only just begun to look around, but there's an issue I'd like to bring up. In Control Center D, there's a section where you have to effectively escort a drill robot across some switch blocks and then blow up a rock without damaging the robot to allow it to reach its destination. The rock respawns if you blow it up beforehand or scroll it off screen.

Now, I'm going to say this right now: what comes next is opinion. Subjective, unconfirmed, biased opinion. I don't make any claims to present this as 'fact', and it's not an argument that I'm justifying. It's just what I, as a player, feel when I play the game.

That rock, with its respawning-ness, represents to me the first time I felt like the game was not being...legit, is what I want to say. It's difficult to describe, but I feel like it breaks the game's policy, somehow. I view DT3 as a pretty difficult game, but it's not an unfair or cheap difficulty. It rewards good play, and punishes bad play pretty harshly, but them's the breaks. That rock seems like it doesn't fit that. The whole drill robot thing is, in essence, a little escort mission, and when faced with such an annoying task, most players will make attempts to go on ahead, and deal with obstacles they might find in advance. That's good play. That's intelligent play. Now, by having the rock respawn, yes, it forces you to make a semi-unreliable trick shot with the bombs, but that's not the issue. The issue is that it feels like it's forcing the player to do the section in a 'dumb' way, in a way that isn't good play and which shouldn't be a thing that needs to happen.

Now, I know that having a puzzle and then making sure the player can only use one solution to that puzzle isn't bad game design, but I feel it could have been done far better than it was in this instance. We've encountered rocks before. Every time, they were non-respawning. That's one of the properties we've ascribed to rocks. This one does respawn, without any indication that it's going to, and because other rocks don't, it feels like it shouldn't. It feels like an obstacle that the player SHOULD be able to take out in advance, and isn't. It just feels like a total ass pull with regards to the design, and that's disappointing. I mean, by all means, force the bomb shot, but use an obstacle that makes sense in the context of what the player already knows. Maybe bomb activated switches that only open a door for a few seconds or something? I don't know. Perhaps even just have a little comment from Jeremy to kind of address the situation, turn it into a bit of a joke or make light of it like with the 'cheating' podoboos in the Zelda section or that one pit that Jeremy knew you'd fall into in the Water Temple. Heck, even just make the rock a different colour, give some indication that it's special and might have different behaviours. As it is, the discrepency between the properties rocks have had in the past and the ones that particular rock has (seemingly, for no real reason other than to make the game arbitrarily harder by limiting intelligent pre-removal of obstacles) makes the section feel like it isn't playing 'fair', something the game as a whole has avoided. (Also: I hate to say it, but there's a hint of laziness about it. Like I said, it feels like it should be a different obstacle because it acts differently, but that was just kept as a rock to save time and effort. I don't mean to be rude, but...yeah.)

...Phew. I don't feel happy about what I just wrote. I can just tell that either there'll be a really good reason for it, or that I'm being a crybaby and over-reacting to something that shouldn't be anything special, or something of that kind. I also don't feel like I explained any of my thoughts well, and certainly not concisely. But hey, feedback is feedback. As a noob, I can't deliver the same level of technically minded input that less idiotic gamers could, so I'm trying to make up for it by providing sizeable amounts of rich qualitative data. I dunno. I just felt really disappointed by the whole thing, especially since I've been enjoying the game so much, and I've been so impressed by the overall tightness of the quality. I mean, I've had the demo two days, maybe, and I've already clocked roundabouts eight hours and almost 500 deaths, which should say everything about whether I'm enjoying playing it. Oh well. Rich data is rich data, I guess, even if it's being provided by a whiny hamfisted idiot.

Seeking to prolong the time until I'd have to deal with everybody's favourite rock, I decided to give the first extra gate a whirl. My reasoning (and those of you in the know may permit themselves a little chuckle here) was that, as the recommended heart total was five and I had six, I was suitably OP and that it would therefore not be that hard.
Haha. Little chuckle is over.
Realistically, though, I found this section challenging enough to split my play sessions over two days, with rooms one and two (and some tentative attempts at room three) in the first day, and rooms three and four in the second. The upshot of this is that I don't have anything to say about the first room, because I don't actually remember it. All I can recall about it is that it wasn't nearly as hard as rooms two or three, and that I was initially confused by how munchers seem to 'rise' on the pipe you're standing on just a fraction of a second quicker than the munchers on the pipe you WANT to be on fall. That and that it involved bullet bills? My recollection really is hazy.

Room Two started with a sign telling me to get the hell out if it was too much for me. That...that set the tone, really. On reflection, however, I actually loved this room. Maybe it's a personal thing, but my least favourite kills in games like this are when I make a mistake and there's no realistic chance to bring it back, so I have to basically sit there in a damage source until I finally die and respawn. My favourite deaths, however, are in rooms such as these. Because the condition is an instant kill if you screw up, you feel close to death all the time, and it's quite exhilarating. I also liked the way the room basically consisted of a single, focused challenge. It basically said, in no uncertain terms, "So, little boy, can you Koopa hop? I don't think you can. Here's a room that's going to prove it." Well, I could by the end of it, and that felt pretty great. A good room.

Room Three. This is the first room that' I had such trouble with that I gave it a nickname. Two, in fact, and taken together they pretty much explain my thoughts on the whole thing. The first is 'The Room That Wouldn't F__king End', and the second is 'My Little Travesty: Timing is Witchcraft.' It's also (and this might surprise people, but shouldn't) the first time I've ever felt the need to chug that 'life fluid' (because I totally don't call it Red Potion in my mind what are you talking about) that I got all the way back with the Mushroom shop people. Which brings up a very salient point: the game doesn't restore any arrows you used before you died in a room, but it'll give you back your red potion? I mean, I ain't complaining, since red potion isn't cheap, but I found it a tiny bit weird. (For anyone wondering why I didn't use it beforehand despite my lack of skill: I'm a JRPG player. Why would I waste money on healing potions when I could save up for some sweet equips? You'll be happy to know I bought the drop increasing items first, too, to make grinding for the rest of them easier. Such is the way of the RPG.)
So, yeah, this room is a complete duck cluster. Podoboos, maces, lava and expert timing, oh my. It's strange how much of it you can 'learn', though. At first, I thought the proximity activated podoboos might screw me over since they're based on your own position instead of the intricate timing of the maces, but I quickly realised that if you're in a position where the timing of the podoboo would make it impossible, you should've died long before that anyway because you've been going opposite to the timing required by the room. Is that good design? No idea. What I did notice was how long the room was, hence the first nickname. It's a longish stretch by itself, but that effect is compounded by the fact that you need to wait for the stars to align before you can make the next jump safely, so it feels longer than it is. I get the feeling that this was intentional, because the sign was exactly where I felt the room should have ended before I realised that it didn't. The second nickname comes from the mace windmills in the latter half of the room; although ostensibly I managed to time my way through them on the last pass, for the longest time I just did not understand how their timing worked worked and allowed them to sink their massive steely girth into Jerry's fragile little face. This victory was brought to me entirely by red potion, and I hope I never have to do anything like that again without the loving and tender invincibility frames granted by a dash.

Room Four. My first reaction, of course, was There's more?!, but after a few minutes of making Jerry groove to the music (and wishing I had a rave mode), I ponied up...and realised that I had no idea how to time those munchers. Luckily, this room was way, way shorter and easier than the last one, and due to my red potion abuse I could just about tank a muncher hit and still be in with a shot. Because of that, the room wasn't as frustrating as it should have been, but just the fact that it even existed was enough of a player punch, despite the fact that it was deliciously short and easy in comparison to the last two. And what did I do all that for? A single piece of heart, a wallet upgrade that I am in no way even close to needing, and one of some kind of secondary McGuffin set I probably won't even be able to use, because I'm guessing it unlocks some sort of secret dungeon or ending or whatever and that won't be in the demo yet. Oh well. If nothing else, I have learned how to koopa-hop like a boss and reliably land on one block wide platforms, So, until tomorrow, I will grind for internetz to replace my potion, see if I can get anywhere interesting by exploiting my bomb jump, and rest up for Jerry vs. Rock: the epic rematch.