I keep clicking the tall grass like a degenerate. There's a whole convention center to explore, a maid cafe with new cosplayers, some kind of date system they patched in, but no. I'm rubbing my cursor on the same pixel bush for twenty minutes because the patch notes said it forces shiny encounters. My brain knows this is stupid. My hand won't stop. The Jolteon cosplayer in the cafe is probably wondering where I went. I was supposed to save her or something. Instead I'm here, edging the RNG.

The combat is basically Pokemon if Pokemon were horny and the "trainers" were women in increasingly damaged costumes. You don't catch them with balls. You tear their clothes off. That's the mechanic. Hit them hard enough and the fabric gives way, which feels like a metaphor I should unpack with my therapist but honestly I'm too busy grinding for the Gardevoir girl. She's in the maid cafe too. Both of them are savable, the compendium says. The compendium is actually useful now, it replaced the sticker book and shows you all the tear states. You can just look at the art without fighting. But where's the accomplishment in that.

The writing has this weird self-aware humor that almost makes me forget I'm playing what is essentially a strip battle simulator. Carmen stopped drinking poison to show the jabronies how it's done. Mara was stealing 100% of MP and promised to use it for "efficiency and entertainment value." Sure, Mara. Sure. The Ivy date questline actually has an ending now, which is good because loading an old save just to get blueballed by a missing reward image was a special kind of frustration. The animated reward is there. It's fine. It's more than fine. I should probably go trigger it instead of hunting shinies in the tall grass but the clicking, the rubbing, the tiny dopamine hit when the screen flashes. This is why I can't have nice things.