What Changed?
When fighting the First Villain at the end of Chapter 6, the game would crash with an error:
Failed to load: "img/enemies/Actor3_3.png"
This file did not exist in the demo build of the game, despite existing in playtest and development builds. I've uploaded a new copy of the game with this file replaced.
At the same time, some less game-breaking bugs were resolved:
The Item Shop in Dawnstar Palace no longer sells a 0-gold no-name item which does nothing
The Church in Fairy Falls now only opens after Einstein is defeated, rather than if you just keep knocking on the door enough
The Goddess in the Fairy Grotto will only appear after you have been defeated by the First Villain (Unbeatable version), rather than after you defeat Einstein
A 21 megabyte WAV file that accidentally slipped into the prior demo build was removed, reducing the game's size on disk accordingly
Root Cause
RPG Maker MZ has two different battle modes: "side view" and "front view". In Trope Tales, side view is the default for most of the game. However when fighting the Four Main Villains (and a handful of other important boss characters to come) the game switches to a front view battle. This puts the boss front-and-center with no distractions, making the battle feel a bit more epic.
RPG Maker stores all sprites for "side view" enemies in "img/sv_enemies" and stores all "front view" enemies in "img/enemies". So if you ever intend to battle an enemy in both modes, you'll need to include their image in both of these folders.
The problem comes in with RPG Maker's "Exclude Unused Assets" feature. This feature allows you to automatically delete any images, audio files, or animations that are never referenced in your game anywhere. Apparently if your default battle mode is "side view", RPG Maker deletes the entire "img/enemies" directory. On the contrary, if your default battle mode is "front view", RPG Maker deletes the entire "img/sv_enemies" directory.
This means that when building my game with "Exclude Unused Assets" checked, the front view sprites were removed from the final build.
Short-term, in order to fix this, I've built the game three times:
Once for Windows with "Exclude Unused Assets" checked
Once for Mac OS with "Exclude Unused Assets" checked
Once for Windows with "Exclude Unused Assets" unchecked
This third build created a properly packed and encrypted version of the image file which I could then copy to the other two builds. I uploaded these two new builds with the missing image included.
Long-term, I have a better fix: I've been working on an RPG Maker Asset Manager tool which can more accurately scan for used assets. It detects assets referenced in plugin configurations, assets referenced indirectly (e.g. via tags in message blocks), assets hard-coded into plugins, etc. It can even detect when you switch from front view to side view in your game, and will persist both folders. When my full game releases I intend to make this tool available on Steam as a free download for anyone who buys Trope Tales. I'll also make the tool available standalone on itch.io when it's finished.
Discovery
Once again, Malok gets the credit for reporting these bugs. Huge thank you!