Ok well I understand what your going for, my problem was I went in expecting standard linear curve difficulty, so I was on cruise control in the second battle and got completely wrecked.
Like I mentioned previously, I put in that verbal warning and a recommendation to use those buff items
I suppose it's probably not the best of ideas to make the second fight of a game a boss fight. Originally I did plan to have a more-medium-easy-level difficulty fight at the entrance of the library before the boss, but rejected it because the sensible option would be for everyone to attack all at once. It would make more gameplay sense, but makes Cat look dumber than I thought she should be.
I also tend to under use potions in games as I actually hate the whole powerup potion mechanic (but thats just me.) So that would be a factor here.
I liked potion prebuffing in Swordflight, so I included it here as another resource to manage. However, if you don't want to use potions, might as well just stay out of the room entirely.
It is quite amusing to have speedbumps like the housekeeper, and then feel mildly bad about killing them afterwards.
In Wannika's defense, no one in this thing actually dies (until the final area anyway), they're just beaten until they can't fight anymore. I even changed the default text from "died" to "defeated" to reflect this.
Maybe rather than using 'enemy skill info' you could use the narrative to warn the player, eg: "hey guys, sounds like a lot of zombies stumbling around the in that next room" etc.
I'm not sure how effective a warning would be. It's an additional area to explore, most people are going to want to check it out.
And a quick note I wanted to make on dialogue: at times it felt a bit 'cutesy' given the subject matter, but then Im not sure of the age of the characters and I guess it probably fits if your source material is animu stuffs which is not my area of expertise?
Wannika, Sue, and Cat are roughly 19-20, John is mid-20s, and Emma is late-20s/30. Yeah, the cutesiness is part of the inspirational material, though it's live action, not animated.
The western equivalent would be stuff like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! kill! (sampled in a White Zombie's Thunder Kiss '65: "I never try anything, I just do it... Wanna try me?"), Ed Wood's The Violent Years, Switchblade Sisters, Savage Streets, Angel.
I did like that most conversations were short and to the point, juxtaposed with the 'lore dump' longer text in the middle. I think this a great use of text, if most of the writing is succinct and to the point then I actually enjoy reading the occasional big text dump.
Much thanks.