Deltarune: Friendless

I'm impressed with everything I've played with so far! I only have two major gripes and one tweak:

1. The fight desperately needs checkpoints. There's way too many phases to comfortably progress through the fight without dying a few times, and the memory threshold is too high to do all that on repeat. It gets exhausting. I'd say every two phases should introduce a checkpoint.

2. The Gerson attack. You should change the controls so that the shield rotates with the mouse, instead of clicking to rotate. Trying to click quickly to block attacks feel so awkward and not at all intuitive. It just leads me to being confused what click goes in what direction when you're also having to process a million bullets coming your way.

3. The purple soul section. You should explain that left click makes you go up, right click goes down. Also, give the player breathing room to actually read the text.

I finished both routes and this is a very cool game!! I really like that this is a sort of culmination of all the theories of the chapter 3+4 era, this game will be a really neat time capsule in the future

The writing was very well done too, the characters behave reasonably how I would expect after the 4 chapters, and the backstory scene with Dess and the secret bosses was amazing

For the fight itself, I really like the idea but I have some problems:
-The soul mechanic is poorly explained and also very hard to understand since it does a lot of things at once, parry, blocking and shockwave. For a new player this is too much to keep track of, but after a few hours I ended up understanding how it works

-The cooldowns are super super long so the mechanic feels like an emergency button more than anything, I also don't like that the parry and shockwave both have cooldowns, this makes it so you are just waiting half the time

-The parry timing is super strict so for a good while I thought the blocking was the parry itself and wondered why were the bullets not dissapearing, I think it should be more lenient

-Some bullets barely give any TP when destroyed and it's not based on size or anything so it feels super random

-Some hitboxes are scuffed, especially the cat paws and the teeth in the first phase

-The final attack is super chaotic, there are red trails dropping from the top of the screen and the soul can also bleed, it's a lot of visual clutter and is difficult to focus on dodging and damaging the Friend, also for the purple soul part, if the purple bullets spawn too far away from each other you have no way of dodging the Friend so it's like forced damage

-There is a bug where sometimes after the mouse control sections the screen still is gray so you can't tell if bullets are white or red

Overall I understand that these are oversights from being a pre-release, I hope these can be fixed and good luck on the development!

I really enjoyed this game, but there's a few things that could be improved:
-The timing for the parry is currently very strict and very often too risky to go for. I think making it just slightly more leaniant would make it much more useful.
-Some hitboxes, such as the teeth or pointed tails are very scuffed and can easily hit you even if you're clearly not touching them. The hitbox issues also add to the parry issues, because knowing when to parry is made harder due to the inconsistent hitboxes.
-It can be very hard to tell what's going on in the final section (mainly with orange and yellow souls), which can lead to hits that feel unfair.
-The cooldown on shockwaves, blocks and especially parries feels slightly too long, making it less fun to use, since you're only basically only using it when needed instead of being able to chain parries together. I understand changing this would nerf the difficulty by a lot, but it could be compensated for by something, like nerfing TP gain slightly.
I still found this fight to be really fun, but these things would make this fight even better.

This was fun! I have to say that I think I prefer what we got, since I was never much of a fan of Friend being the final shadow crystal boss instead of a major character. But this was still very well put together and an interesting alternate timeline. Best wishes to everyone who worked on this, and cheers to the end of an era.

Awesome fangame but theres only a couple problems that make the enjoyment lesser for me;

- Checkpoints. The fight is honestly pretty lengthy, and dying on the last attack and having to it ALLLLL again is one of the most frustrating feelings you can have in a fangame like this.

- In the Gerson section of the remembering attacks, the controls feel super awkward when it would be so much simpler just to use buttons during that one, having to repeatedly click to turn is very slow and awkward for a green soul section, especially during the 8 directions part. Hopefully it either gets a button option for that section or just make it so the shield faces your mouse instead of the slow and bad feeling spam click.