Wildwood Story's Hard Mode can be a bit rage inducing

[86]

Not to mention enemies completely destroying your health bar in just a few hits... especially when some of them feel kind of unfair (i'm looking at you, weird little black bugs with honing projectiles that you Can Not Dodge because they'll just hit you anyways if you use the dodge button). Plus the fact you can't even upgrade your passives to increase your damage output. Sure, you could use foxglove, but it's really hard to find it because of its rarity unless you grow it (I don't have the mews to buy the recipe for it right now considering everything costs hundreds of mews compared to my regular gaining of.. say... very much less than 100 mews an in-game day).

I'm not gonna lie, I just reloaded my save after the healing items loss even if it meant having to redo an entire boss battle because I am not gathering all that stuff again.

[mirror]

Yeah, it's ridiculous. I attempted to do it, BUT WOW. Those black bug things were hard enough on EASY???

[86]

Alright, by now I've got hard mode pretty much down to a T, but the thing that still bothers me is how unfair random battles are. Not from a standpoint of them being too hard to fight, but from the standpoint of "the colony cats that spawn to help you fight are next to useless in hard mode."

Examples posted below. These clips are a bit old and I've upgraded my active skills to maximum since taking them + collected a few more power paws, but they still apply.

This applies to cats you've paired with through the buddy system too. If you're not constantly babying them during a battle, they just die instantly. I often find that my only use for the buddy system in hardmode is taking Talon out to farm prey in tiles to gain influence...

Another thing that bothers me about the combat in this game (although it's not an objectively bad thing, just a personal nitpick) is the lack of i-frames during attack charges. This includes the regular basic attacks, and wild slash. You can get your health absolutely nuked if you don't use the shield ability before charging at a bunch of voidlings face-first which is super annoying to me. You can see this in effect to a lesser scale in the first clip, even.