The Grand Airing of Grievances

I do kinda wish that the difficulty modes were harder especially with NG+, mainly because I find the self-control difficult to NERF myself when there are better options for my build. Would it be safe to say that most that are having issues didn’t play many platforming games on NES, SEGA, or SNES? 

Re: the size of the game mourningxsun , you set yourself up with unrealistic expectations (as I'd pointed out before in the discord etc way back when we were talking about it before the game came out) with your math-theory that you thought the game was 2x the size of SotN + inverted, so that being 3600 squares. That was never going to happen, it's crazy.

The game is about 1600 squares, yes, but those are 16:9 squares and not the old games' 4:3 ones. They can't be reckoned by the same measurement because that's more screen space per each square (now wide rectangles instead of squares, more like it). I know you know this, and iirc you had some kind of explanation that somehow they ended up being the same anyway and it didn't matter, but still the game is bigger because of this. It's just the same as the illusion that the game feels "slower" even if it is roughly the same speed as SotN - this is because Miriam is covering "less distance" because there's more screen you're seeing, not because she's actually moving slower. Games in old 4:3 low resolutions are smaller, and all rooms are basically much closer to squares. RotN rooms are larger rectangles. Beyond that, I can tell you that Angel and the rest of the team agonized over measuring this stuff to make sure this was right re: size. Angel-Corlux

About the part re: difficulty, I don't buy for a second that level 1 on hard mode is easier than Order of Ecclesia's normal. There's no way. You generally die in two hits, and Vepar is especially rough from what I've heard. I was quite satisfied with the difficulty on Normal, myself, since I had to eat a good bit of food if I wanted to beat something on the first try. Some bosses actually did require me to do some re-fights, but not a lot, and that's fine - that's not what these games are about to me, anyway. Hard and Nightmare are there for people who want more of that challenge, though, and I think OoE is certainly tougher than Normal RotN, but we were told to expect that and it's what we got - just as with the map (the stated goal for the map was 1600 or more).

The other things I just don't have as much to say about or didn't bother me, even if I could see them being issues for people. Overall, though, what I think happened here is you created some expectations beyond what they clearly said they were doing, man. Map's big enough to clear their goal, and the game is actually harder than the "around SotN" bar they had set.

So they could have made the room blips squares again instead of the rectangles arbitrarily and thus had a much higher number of them and then you would have been satisfied? That would be cheap and cheesy. The method of counting the units is the same, but the units are bigger. Here's an easy example I think:

The latter of course can't fill out the full of the screen as it is of course, obviously, so those borders are there. You'd need quite a bit more space/pixels to make that happen or a gross stretching, so it's shrunk down. A RotN rectangle is something like 1.3 of a previous Iga game's square. Yes, they could have arbitrarily counted them in squares again to artificially sate a want for a higher, inflated number, but imo that's silly.

On the difficulty, I think I can speak on it, yes. Even on NG+ for hard, stage hazards to my ridiculous level 50 character do a bit over 400 damage. I would imagine that and many other situations would be instant death to a NG character on the difficult, and OoE has very few instances I can remember of ~2 hits being the end of Shanoa. I don't know how it ramps up, so I can't speak for the whole of RotN hard, but I know that even if I'm careless with a ridiculously strong NG+ character I can still bite it. That being said, again difficulty/being harder than OoE was not an intent or expectation that was had.

It's just that what you're saying imo contradicts itself - it should be about the game being bigger, yes, and bigger in actuality rather than the # of units. The save room is 30% bigger, yeah, and so are all the other rooms in the castle - those which do count for more space you're exploring. I definitely didn't expect you'd agree with making the unit of measurement smaller like it used to be to fix the whole thing.

My bad on the spikes, apparently I just didn't notice how much damage they did before or it didn't happen often enough because there were less monsters around to potentially knock me into them etc. I'll be curious to find out if you're right about RotN hard being easier than OoE, because I won't believe that until I see it.