I have a very strange problem with chapters 3-5 that I haven’t seen anybody talk about: the lack of normal enemy encounters.
If you look at chapters 1&2, there were a lot of enemy encounters. There was one pretty much every other room, and often several per room. Additionally, for most enemies, you encounter more than you need to recruit them all.
Chapter 3 does an okay job at this. There are a lot less encounters, but still more than enough for each enemy to be recruited.
Chapters 4&5, however, is where it really becomes an issue for me. They focus a lot more on their movement gimmicks, which while really cool, they kind of leave normal enemies in the dust. The chapters are much longer than previous chapters, but have much fewer enemies. For several enemies in these two chapters, there’s only enough encounters with it to recruit it. There’s several rooms between each encounter, and they don’t even last that long. Floradinns are particularly egregious imo. They were hyped up before the chapter as the rudinn equivalent, and then there’s a single encounter with two of them, and that’s the only floradinn encounter in the entire chapter, while there were many rudinns in chapter 1. We also know that there was the capability for there to be normal enemy encounters in the platforming sections, and that’s only utilized for a single enemy (if I remember correctly).
tl:dr; not enough enemy encounters in chapters 4&5
I'd agree that chapter 5 doesn't have much unique normal battles, but I think that chapter 4 has an even split between normal battles and climbing sections
There’s a triple floradinn encounter in the room where you meet Starwalker if you backtrack if I remember correctly. so it’s technically not a one time encounter (also a great money grinding spot because of scythemare)
I still agree though. Like, I’m pretty sure most of the chapter 5 enemies are only found in 1 or 2 rooms, with the only examples that I know of that appear more than that being netskie, shinobeetle, shi and terakota, which is a real shame because all the enemies are fun to fight imo. Sheary and netskie aren’t even able to be re-fought as far as I’m aware which makes it even worse.
That's not a problem, that's a solution. By limiting the amount of times the player fights the same enemy, every encounter feels unique and interesting. This is a good thing.
i remember, on my first playthrough of ch5, i had 2/3 shinobeetles recruited. and i got kind of scared that i'd missed something, because i thought i was closer to the end than i actually was
so i backtracked to the room with the shinobeetle encounters, to make sure i at least recruited them
and then, when i got to the actual 3rd shinobeetle encounter, i was a bit miffed because it turned out that was entirely redundant
