Talk:Tokugawa Kaiten Meikyū - Ōoku/@comment-31180761-20190405104027/@comment-29547051-20190405112022

You've pratically answered your own question there. Explaining it wouldn't mean anything, but if there was a reason for the maze, it would hold a reason for the first week of this event where everyone (including myself) didn't fully grasp the event's mechanics with the gauge being filled up. In the field of critical game studies, this would go greatly with the feeling of understanding one of those feelings of "Metaphors", which by definition of game feel refers to the how the game mechanics relate to the game's theme. If the game involves things the player understands, the player will bring preconceived notions of how those things should behave.

I figured this was the devs attempt to stir up a commotion amongst the players that understood nothing of the game mechanic and that it was left up to their precognitive minds to figure out if the gauge was good or bad. As for each hallways and dialogues being one step at a time, that can easily be no doubt part of the metaphors, where each decisions would warn players that this area is either a safe or a danger spot where it would either bring you to the lowest point of raising the gauge more or encountering an enemy and increasing it more. This is also part of the precognitive approach at whether we think it was a good idea to keep increasing the gauge or not, thus adding awareness to the player into traversing carefully in the maze.

However, once we've all figured out the true purpose of the gauge was for, most of that game feel got depleted as now it wasn't anything too special as for powering up the final boss of the game. It would've made a good mechanic for this event, but there were some flaws made around the end. As soon as you got a hold of those 25 Hanafuda cards, you could easily decrease or increase the gauge, but that also defeats the purpose of the whole first week that most of us were struggling; even without the cards, it was still too severe of a punishment for players to face that 1Million HP Behemoth when you have some new players that barely made it after finishing LB3. They should've done something like weaken the master like LB3 did and made the players traverse different spots to lower the gauge, but this was the laziest way to solve a problem.

In conclusion, this event did have the potential to stir the players up on the first week, but they flopped on the second week when the problem could be easily solved. If ever a chance you develope a game, you need to find ways to challenge the cognitive minds of players towards the very end instead of dropping out. Help guide the players hand around the beginning, then steadly let it go for them to explore and solve problems themselves. That's what it means to run a good event.