The sheer Haroldness of this is absolutely off the charts. I was in awe of every artistic interpretation of Harold I experienced. The fact that you could make such an amazing entry despite not being some Harold fanatic just speaks to your artistic integrity, and I'm honored every year you grace the jam with your creations.

I think you knowingly did not aim to please everyone, which I can respect, but no doubt it will drop you a few points in areas. Reid mode is hard. . . very hard, and I want to beat it! But the effort and time necessary to understand combat was just a bit too much for me to manage in the judging time period. On Priscilla mode, I don't think there was much thought I had to put into combat aside from trying to inflict status effects and then using the attacks that felt strongest, so on the lower difficulty, combat felt like a repetitive hurdle in the way of experiencing the dialog.

Story too felt a bit beyond me. Even though I fancy myself a bit of a Haroldjam scholar, I was somewhat confused by the plot. I think I picked up the main points of the tournament, secret plan, and sacrifice, but I always felt like my understanding was not doing your storytelling justice. The little side stories one gets from deepening relationships were really nice though. Regardless, you get the honor as the top Haroldverse world builder by far (and that ending was simply awe-inspiring).

I do plan a full scale Reid-level play through, I plan on getting all the endings, and I swear on Harold I'll decode your secret clues you've dropped. Thanks for submitting such an impressive entry!

I know my opinion is going to differ greatly from the other comments, but I felt like this one was just OK. That may be due to having played your past works like last year's maximum effort trilogy and Cyberlord's Mayhem, so I know what your "best" looks like. This game struck me as a lesser-quality knockoff of Cyberlord's Mayhem. Some of it may be colored by having played only on Priscilla difficulty, but I don't think that's entirely the case.

The structure of the game is very similar to Cyberlord's Mayhem: there are multiple party members to choose from, battles are presented in a rapid fire boss rush format, and you get to gear up and talk to party members between major battles. The difference here is that the execution just doesn't feel as polished as that earlier game. Like, I ran with the default party the whole game and was fine, there's an OP combination in Glittering Horn - Sparksplosion - Oldhar Darkspark, and the text feels like you're trying to use fancy words which only serves to cloud the message. I didn't really get into the story due to the awkward dialog.

There are plenty of positives about the game, though. The action sequences are clearly complex and unique. I recognize several from Human's Action Sequence pack, but there definitely was effort made to make them your own. It also appears an effort was made to use as much RTP (and remixed RTP) music as possible. The result is a soundtrack with a lot of variety and every area has a song that fits the overall feel of the area, even if they sometimes are rather short. Finally, there is tons of custom art in here, some with multiple layers of meaning to them. I thought making Harold-styled frames for the portraits was particularly clever.

In summary, this is a fine entry, but I know you can do even better. Keep refining your technique, and maybe try trimming the final product down even more to increases the polish, and see how that goes.

Hoo boy, a lot to unpack here.

Let me first say: overall, very solid in pretty much every area.

I didn't get a lot of the story references to last year's jam either due to my poor memory or it was related to games I hadn't played, so trying to digest each wall of text was... let's say I appreciated the quality of the writing more than the quantity or details. Sometimes it felt like "jargon soup" during the expository scenes, which is unfortunate as the depth of world-building is impressive on the one hand but it pulls the audience out of the experience/ruins immersion to have so many WTF-is-happening moments. I don't know if there's any way of mitigating these issues while telling the story you wanted to tell, so take all this with a handful of salt. Other players may also be more in tune with the meta arc than I.

Music choices were good, seems like most SFX were RTP which is fine.

I kinda wish you weren't encouraged to pick a single team and double down on it. The relationship mechanic and how it impacted stats/skills was satisfying but it also meant I ignored characters for the whole playthrough. And, while I enjoyed the entire game, it was definitely too lengthy to do a second run just to see what other sidequests were there. (choice over-commitment and being unnecessarily long are criticisms I have about my own entry, so there's that...) I would have liked to see dialog branches or something interactive during story scenes; while the menu navigation was well done, structurally there wasn't much "gameplay" outside of battles and menuing.

Speaking of battles, I think 1-2 waves of jobbers could have been trimmed per "area". I get their utility as a chance to experiment with character skills and maybe drain some resources, but there came a point where I just started AoE-ing them down to get it over with. The fights vs. enemy contestants were much more mechanically interesting though it felt like giving them all Stimulants was kind of an artificial way of padding the fights out. Surprisingly the area bosses felt much easier than the 3-v-3 battles, and I usually cleared these in just a few rounds even with the auto-revive or other shenanigans. It seemed like each one had a cool gimmick at least.

The difficulty spike after the 3 main areas was curious. I had done all of the side dialog and was purchasing items like a madman so it didn't seem too daunting, but Buffet Harold in particular felt at times like his damage mitigation was unfair. (I also suspect, I should have remembered to hover my mouse over him to see what effects were modifying damage, but I forgot about that plugin until the following battle.) There might have actually been too many mechanics to keep track of. Like, it's great to see this level of complexity with a close-to-default battle system, and some of the synergies were just fantastic (Minotaur Harold's design was brilliant in particular), but there were also some things that felt like they should have interacted with one another that didn't; perhaps having a more uniform design with fewer unique gimmicks might have helped there. Side note, it doesn't look like any restorative items remove the DoT stacks from Dark spark type moves, even though the descriptors imply they should.

Final few fights were tricky, epic, and over-the-top. Ending was solid, and despite being out of the loop in many ways I found the wrap-up fulfilling. All in all, the character interactions were super well done once they really got underway.

Lastly, I wish I could award bonus points for this being such a love letter to Haroldness itself and a celebration of the community at large.

Fun little story with some humor, mechanically very much a standard rm game and very wordy for a jam game but fun nonetheless.

Well this one was certainly interesting. I loved seeing all the last-year harolds pop up in the various battles, and was especially surprised one of my own pop up in there. The character reputation system you have going on gives this one some definite replayability. Some thoughts though:

• Man those enemy damage shields were infuriating! Big Daddy was probably the hardest boss in the game because of how absurd his shield in particular was.
• Ran into a critical bug where Usluci wouldn’t drop his second shield. ended up having to console-kill him to continue. :( (pretty sure I mentioned this one to you)
• A bit long for a jam game, and almost too heavy on the dialog in some parts, but probably not an issue during a later, more casual playthrough when I don’t feel compelled to get through games as quickly as possible.

A+, would get pounded in the butt by a giant minotaur Harold again.

This game is a pure love letter to last year's jam and I love it. Combat was great, story was emotional (even though I don't remember everything that happened in Harold Tales), all those battlers, facesets and CGs were astounding. Honestly just an amazing game!

I nearly died fighting my own Harold, as I felt bad about hitting him and wanted to see what his skills were xD
Oni Harold was the toughest one to fight, much harder than Oldhar and even Haroldmancer 2. 

There were some small grammar issues with its/it's, but other than that I didn't discover any bugs.

Funny Harotaur go beep beep! The battles have a decent amount of complexity to them and I enjoyed trying out each character to see who my favorite was. The custom art is lovely and the interactions before battle with your chosen Harolds was a very flavorful touch. 

I actually did not realize I could change my formation until I stumbled into seeing other characters when using items. (I don't play a ton of RPG Maker games until recently so the thought to "check the Formation menu" didn't occur to me). Overall discovering each characters' abilities and how to combo them into each other was satisfying and I enjoyed my time with this!

All the various Harolds designs were great to see and comedy in this game was well done, although the term "harold" being attached to everything was a bit much.  The battles were a lot to swallow at times but, the story kept me invested. Despite the story being a typical anime tournament arc with minimal stakes, I got more invested in Zakrias's conviction to be his own person.  The game's story definitely feels like a bigger world, I think I might play last year's entry eventually to get the context for this game's events.

Some of the battles are tough! I got stuck at gorilla oldhar on Reid mode, so played it through Priscilla mode. Really nice art with all the different versions of harolds. Impressive plot as always.

WHO WILL BE HAROLDED AS THE CHAMPION!?

In the name of sparkling haroldine justice here is my brief review.

The Story felt like a parody episode of dbz with a good helping dose of nice custom art.

Although not my style of story and not much of a visual novel player, the creator knew how to play with it and clearly has experience before.

One of the things i loved most about this entry are all the custom battlers depicting various harolds.

I ended up spending all my money on stat boosters and bull horned my way through.

Due to the nature of the story it was hard to have emotional investment in any sense of stakes and a lot of the references were lost on me personally. This meant the further i got into the narrative the less i understood. By the end i had kind of gotten confused and not understood what was happening, but enjoyed the accompanying art and music choices.

The final fight with the scrolling entry's of  a previous jam in the background was a fantastic addition however.

Overall solid entry with a unique visual novel and choice approach compared to other entries but i feel it is also on the bloated side and a bit long winded for a jam entry with the additional content. Strong points are definitely its art and fun takes on designs!

How do I defeat Evil!Lucius? The second time he becomes invincible it doesn't end when I defeat his minions.

Oh MAN. THIS ONE IS MY FAVORITE. Seriously impressive. Idk how you did a unique story with all the different custom harold(S) art and even fully colored cgs, damn dude. Even the battles was perfectly balanced

Such a lovely entry indeed <3 I thoroughly enjoyed the battles, the artworks, and of course the story of romance, devotion, fight for power and many more! :D Once again another great entry by Berry! ^_^ I just got back to game deving and it was sweet hearing this news of Berry finishing yet another game jam game, so I just had to try it out! :D And I enjoyed every moment as usual! :D