The changes to the slime boss are fantastic, haha! I love the music change and was quite unprepared for the new stuff. Makes the fight a lot more tactical overall and is a great change. :D
This fact in general holds throughout the game. A lot of the fights have more tricks to them than I remember - clearly you've done some rebalances since the last time I played! In some cases I found myself focus firing down minions ASAP, other times I was splitting my attention between people!
The music changes in general are really well done. As is inevitable, some songs I'm not as fond of, but they generally hit the feel right and that's great. The Giants in particular made that place a lot more intimidating via having the right music, haha.
I, uh, completely missed that it was 'Lupa or Jeeves' for the game haha, so I used Jeeves again like I had done before. I was actually pretty confused where Lupa /went/ as she looked important.
The Diary is a /great/ addition! I'm not sure when it popped up, but I definitely checked it a lot. On the presumption that you can't make a 'characters' section or sommat, It may help to ensure that things get 'completed' so that your incomplete section is more useful - by the end I had a full page of entries sitting in incomplete haha, it made the diary a bit less useful. Still, it is great overall. :D
Heir, Jeeves, Stu, and Hermit struggled /hard/ against the Robber King haha. I really had to stop and reanalyze 'Okay how do I want to accomplish this...' for a bit. It was then strategic and not luck-based when I did win, and I felt great having done so. :D
I fell in love with Benjamin and his farm the moment I stepped there, haha. Don't worry, Marsha, I don't judge. ;) But it's neat to see just... a guy trying to do his own thing.
Because I'm crazy, and unsurprisingly I'm sure, I kept Chuck for a healthy chunk of time (But not all the way to the lighthouse this time haha, I didn't keep his glass jaw around nearly as long as before as I wanted to experiment more :P). But thus, I didn't realize that you could swap around party members until a lot later than I should've! And wow, that changes a lot - now I'm really curious mostly what Vlad and Efriitus /say/ in various situations, and what the differences are. Plus that means you can do stuff like 'three drainers in one party' or what-not.
I do love the added Trivia-ing that's all over the place too! Basically every time someone piped up, it made them feel more and more real. Daggonit Gusto. :P
Chatting with people in the base is also fantastic. I loved hearing what people thought about their allies. Which is again a 'Daggonit Gusto', haha.
There were quite a few a-ha moments when I noticed a mousehole or fire-log in places, and I did like Gusto unlocking doors. It might be cool if you in a localized area removed Gusto or Sirrta or Lilah, had us do a section, then gave them back so we could do the Zelda thing and return for more goodies, haha.
I liked the new pictures! Escaping the Sea Monster is neat, and the catapult was hilarious haha. Clearly an orc came up with that plan. Don't worry, Heir, I'll tell everyone that it was a very manly scream. ;)
Each new area came with a little bit of 'Huh, I'm not sure what to do here, let me explore around', but I rarely ever got really stuck. Although I feel I did some parts weirdly, as for example I never fought in the Arena at all and the plot assumes you did.
The Eris section was /nifty/! I did not expect that at all, haha, and it being more 'zoomed in' than Heir was a very cool touch. And I temporarily got Stu back! :D The madness continues in my bringing not-really-combatant-orcs to the front lines, haha, too bad she can't recruit Glass Jaw Chuck.
Getting back was /hard/, though - it's really hard to leverage Eris into being a useful unit, I feel. She tends to just get beat up on, and it is three turns before she can really kill anything (Transform -> Wrap -> Devour) which is a long time for, say, two bandits to pound her. She probably should either be able to get going much faster, or those commands should become a lot more potent.
Staying on characters for a bit, I did notice that a lot of the characters changed a lot from when I was last playing. They still feel generally balanced amongst each other, though - I had a lot of incentive to swap around people besides Heir. (I also had some incentive to swap out Heir when physical is bad, but even with that he's fairly versatile with that potent Legion Punch such that I tended to keep him in). But thus, I think the characters are in pretty good shape except sadly Gaston, haha.
Sirrta losing her AOE, but getting the powerful two-hitting double fire, makes her an interesting choice compared to the other primarily-mages. She hits a /lot/ harder than Elea, Sheena, or especially Lilah... but then against groups or 'scenarios where I'd like to aim' she is not as good. This is a good thing overall - where Sirrta shines she shines, but she's not always-on.
(Much, much later she did get Darkness, and I gave her the fire ring so she could have AOE flame earlier, but the paradigm remained the same)
Sheena is extremely good - she packs a punch with Quake that is equivalent to Elea's Tornado, and against physical groups or physical multi-hitters Thorns is just the best move, and she has a multi-hitting knockdown, so she's kind of a magic-throwing tank. I feel Sheena is the best character in combat.
Interestingly, I primarily used Elea for her agility/+TP ability, her ice touch that lowers attack, or Tornado spam. There were many cases where big groups would show up, and my response would be 'Okay, girls?' and I'd have Sheena / Elea / Lilah come in and throw AOEs at it until it went away, haha.
Lilah's blizzard hits /way/ less hard than the above three, but Lilah is then valuable for her versatility and general value. I had to gear her with agility gear to get the most use out of magic reflect against some tougher bosses, but the thing about Lilah is that there's basically always /something/ for her to do - even if something is being a healbot for a battle.
To step to the more physical people, Jeeves definitely has been toned down since I recall as he now struggles a bit to do damage. I often had him compared with the somewhat similar Gusto as both are quick attackers, and the Jeeves perk is that he's not as fragile - and Vampire step is quite impactful there, not to mention vampire blood! The Vampire skill itself causing bleed is still vital, although that's another place Gusto matches him as backstab does so too and Gusto tends to not do much in combat besides just whack things haha. Of course, every time I met a new enemy formation, I ordered Jeeves to give me an analyze. :D
To finish off Gusto, he hits like a truck basically forever and is generally useful. I don't find his hide skills to be very useful, though. He does dark blade himself up in rough fights, and I've ever used his decrease atk/def moves, but he's really straight forward. I like tag teaming him with Sheena as she can thorns and become extremely tanky to make up for Gusto being not so tanky.
Talia also hits very hard and thus falls into similar to Gusto. Her moves being super expensive means she rarely did them, however, thus she also fell into 'just an attackbot' in most places.
I didn't experiment too much with the dwarves, but I feel 'slow sturdy attacker' is a slot that was missing, so presuming he fills that role Vadus may be particularly helpful. Vadus' skills aren't super /interesting/, though, which may hurt him.
And that leaves Gaston, haha. I think I needed to heavily hammer his statuses a lot more - but as skills over 10TP are a bit less common to utilize, I never really found a good spot for them. Then his spells are meh - not bad, but certainly not good and he can't AOE rondo like the castier girls. Healing water is also meh - it doesn't heal for much. His one saving grace is the status cleansing that Healing Water brings with it, but Gaston really needs something more to stand out. As is he's not /bad/ per se, just he's sufficiently meh that he rarely feels worth the slot. Usually I'd use him to conserve the HP of my more important characters at best, and would bottom out his MP healing the group just before a boss.
I didn't end up experimenting too much with Eris' group (I wish I had, haha, I just got excited to move forward). Robert joining was a bit of a surprise - if he's able to join you as Heir instead of somebody, that functionality isn't there (possibly due to the Frost blade bug that I listed below).
To hop back to plot stuff for a bit, each 'zone' you go to feels quite distinct! The sharp cut between westeroth and eastoth is very cool - you go from orcs, goblins, imps to centaur, giants, harpies, resulting in a very different feeling. Then again with spiders, dwarves, kobolds. The Giant's zone and Teresa in particular were very well done - both were kinda intimidating! Music helped the giants out with that aspect of things at least.
I /feel/ like I did the kobold/dwarf choice poorly haha, I snuck around the kobolds and got the gem (it took me awhile to realize I wasn't then stuck in there, mind you, as I didn't notice the mousehole until afterwards). I guess that's the nicer of the options (Vadus wants you to kill Bitey, Bitey wants you to kill Vadus, but you can have both of them remain alive if you just sneak around Bitey), but I was kind of expecting the kobolds to come help me beat up the main dwarves, haha. Next time I'll try to just support Bitey to see what the differences are, since I /figure/ Bitey joins you instead of Vadus if you do so?
(Also in that room you can talk to the gold bars and get a popup about them, but you don't actually pick up anything. Is that an oversight? When Vadus joined my team, he did the whole dialogue and then jumped to 'Anyway go back there and get all of it' which confused me. Should I have gone back there afterwards?)
Also wow, uh. My next play will probably be another 'Maximum beef up my army, leave places in tact' playthrough where I try out the people I didn't try the first time, but then when I do my 'Heir eats everyone' playthrough it's going to be rough on poor Eris haha, since I think it'll be just her and Stu. She's tough, though, she can handle it :P
Daggonit Charles, it could've worked out! Granted, you were enslaving my orc bros, but still. I did love how excited the orcs got once they realized it was you, haha. And how excited they got when I dropped their next victim down. :D
Also speaking of neat pictures! The scene where you get the gift to give to the spiderpeople is extremely, extremely creepy, and very, very well done. You did a really good job of playing with people's heads there, and the ending memory was very poignant. I think that's the first time Heir has gotten /that/ angry! I'm being intentionally vague since it's such an awesome scene that I don't want to ruin it for people, haha.
Okay let me shut up here, haha. This game is fantastic :D
(I am using your description of Strong Stuff as my description for orcish ale in my D&D games I run. Nowhere in the list of descriptions will it say 'drinkable'. The taste of the Orcish Strong Stuff can be described as being hit in the face with a brick that is wrapped in barbed wire. :D )
(I also have a /couple/ pictures, and can be way more specific with where I found the bugs/oversights that I'm listing below haha.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bugs:
Spoiler: show
Oversights & Typos:
Spoiler: show
) 
