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Harold, Herald of Haroldovia's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Harold | #12 | 3.895 | 4.267 |
| Fun | #22 | 2.921 | 3.200 |
| Overall | #22 | 3.408 | 3.733 |
| Creativity | #26 | 3.408 | 3.733 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Loved the wide variety of Harolds. Battles were a bit much though.
Rough battles are the best part though. :D
Good storyline and dialog with the characters. Like lots of others, I found combat too tough. First mob wiped my party before I could heal, even after equipping.
Explained combat system, mobs less OP, fixing a few combat bugs so things work right, all would have improved this so much. For jam games, extremely narrow victory conditions dependent on opaque skill farming is going to kill almost everyone. Had no idea what many of the status effects did, and things like panacea didn't remove some of them (weird nail things?).
It was super satisfying to finally win though, and I definitely respect the depth of combat! I think I must have lucked out getting skills and items sufficient to win because I don't think I could have done it without everything I had (Haste + Slow combo 100% necessary, as were a ton of OP potions).
If you had time post jam, tossing some scenes in instead of scrolling text would really boost the storytelling (I almost feel like the players could have gotten the point without the setup story scroll).
Super glad you got a Harold entry in!!
Yeah most of those issues were due to slacking off and not having enough time to finish toward the end. The scrolling text in the beginning though was intentional as a nod toward something that roughly inspired the theme behind this game, and somebody I think caught it in Hawk’s stream: Final Fantasy Legend (1-2)
That said, I love making/playing challenging games so while that probably won’t change about my entries overall, I do plan on adding a difficulty selector going forward. Not everyone likes super-hard fights, after all, and that’s fair. :)
As for lucking out on the skills/items, I did intentionally put the most important utility skills (Morale in particular) at the bottom of the progression tree or in easy to find places so they’d be in most people’s skill sets by endgame. For everyone else, that’s why the king dumps a ton of consumables on the player.
Looking forward to the next Harold jam!
I had fun with this one.
Really challenging fights, but the ample items laying around to find, and the deep skillsets, helped balance it out. The one thing that pissed me off continually was that it seemed like the enemies *always* had initiative. Bah! Were it not for that I probably would have looked for more random encounter trouble to check out more of the cool troops you put together.
Great writing and quality craftsmanship throughout, nice job.
Thanks, glad you liked it overall. :)
As for encounter initiative, most enemies have higher speed than even the fastest player character. It was done as a means to make encounters still a bit dangerous even though you can run from them 100% of the time. In the future, I’ll probably take a different approach though, such as a charge time on escaping.
Ahhh, OK, I understand your reasoning. You created a dangerous world, of course a price must be paid to escape :) It was definitely bad for morale, but does make sense.
Really I don't have a leg to stand on in terms of difficulty/unfairness complaints after I subjected everyone to Haroldry last year lol. Some of the troops had ungodly dodge that really made the fights a slog, I didn't use TP or an equivalent at all, and the skillsets I set up were rudimentary (especially compared to what you built here).
I loved the writing and the story, but the gameplay was REALLY punishing. And I don't mean the difficulty.
Almost all the important mechanics were NOT explained, or at least, not explained in a good way that would help the player figure out what to do before they wiped several times and blamed the game as being 'too hard'
Yeah, I dropped the ball a bit on explanations. Mostly due to last-minuting everything and running out of time.
You guys know there is a submission that is only random encounters right? A web version of this would have been nice, at least I would not have been forced into a generic rating (sry).
Alright, this is an amazing entry. There are some caveats and I hope players read these comments BEFORE getting frustrated, as I was a bit tilted before figuring things out myself.
Gear: "Harriet" won't be able to tank in Clothes. Go buy real armor and equip it. For everyone.
Encounters: Turn off encounters. Just do it. When you've geared up and want to learn a few skills, turn them on, farm for a bit, then turn them off. I don't know WHY random battles are more difficult than half the bosses, but it's a jam game so I am just gonna roll with it.
Good stuff:
I totally get and agree that the difficulty is off-putting, and the lack of mechanics explanations resulted in a steep learning curve. But honestly I've never seen a jam game throw in Reflect strats in the first combat, so I knew I was there for it.
Final boss has one super cheap move that is a near-guaranteed Phoenix Down use (good thing you get like 100 of them!) but is otherwise reasonable IMO.
So yeah it's tough, and too tough for a jam really, but not insurmountable as long as you have some foreknowledge. Once you can get in this game's groove, it's a heck of a ride.
Thanks for trying it out! :D
If by skill learning, you mean Harriet’s skills then yeah, while a progress bar would be good, it’s currently random (30% for the skills learned via Fury Brand, 20% for those from Double Slash, 10% for most others, 5% for her strongest-but-not-spammable skill)
Also I’ve come to agree that the random mooks are a bit too strong. At some point, I plan on putting up a developer’s cut, post-jam version that addresses a lot of the balance issues: most mooks roughly 30% lower offense, some bosses buffed, final boss given phases, etc. And a difficulty selector or some kind.
Fun facts for everyone:
Ah, OK that does explain a bit!
At some point after turning off randos I mentally made a note that it would be a better game as a series of story battles, or possibly with on-map random mobs that you can avoid. Honestly, I don't like on-map battles unless you're fighting on the actual map Chrono Trigger style, so I think the best option for a post-jam edition would be to just run with the "no random fights" paradigm.
Not sure how that would impact your skill learning (though, really the same system would work in a longer game even without random fights).
But yeah, great job, and this entry definitely made me think more than most! (about the good and the bad, but mostly the good)
Oh the skill training would be pretty unaffected. I’d use visual encounters that randomly trigger a battle from the appropriate encounter list when the player interacts with them. (No chasey-unavoidable-collision BS) Leaving the area would just refresh them to fight again.
I liked the idea and really enjoyed the first battle, and the introduction of Harold. But after that, maybe I'm just bad, but I was just getting frustrated with the battles. I would have liked to have been able to progress further and see more of it.
They’re meant to be challenging, but I can understand that not everyone likes that sort of thing. Some tips in case you decide to give it another go later:
Good luck!
I like the writing a lot (flex-flex-flex) and the way you integrated Lore/Blue Magic skills into the starting fight was very well done (flex-flex-flex).
Battles were to difficult so in the end I couldn't finish it. Needs a bit more balancing.
Lots of cute ideas though and chalk full of Harold goodness!
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Little Issues I noticed when:
1) When you leave the tutorial fight and go to the castle (Castle Em'Vie), you're still facing down. It's awkward. This is true of other places too.
2) It looks like the guards in front of the throne have part of their heads cut off.
Thanks for giving it a go! I admit, I have a lot of love for hard battles with some degree of complexity. That coupled with the lack of explanation means I’m kinda just…throwing people in and expecting them to be able to handle the combat with little to no explanation about certain mechanics. For example buffs and debuffs are important, and they work very differently than they do in most RM games in that they decay in increments of 5 each turn until the stat normalizes. It’s also necessary to “control” the fights through the use of said buffs and debuffs.
I also forgot to explain a few other things, such as what Harriet’s Cover skill does (draws most attacks to her and mitigates incoming damage) as well as the archivist’s basic attack also restoring a good chunk of mp.
In the future, I really need to just implement a Story Mode and Challenge Mode setting for different types of players. Sorry about that. As for the other points:
Yeah, that’s an oops, but a minor one thankfully. I’ll go patch things like that up after everything involving the game jam is over with.
Good catch! That would be the sprite offset not playing well with that segment of the pillars, which are set to * passage. Not sure how I didn’t notice that.
It's all good. I hope to revisit this one when I have more time (I wanna try and give as many of the games a go as I can) , although I did figure out the Archivist's basic attacks gimmick and I liked it. It's a good thing for a magic heavy character.