Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics are a mix of RTP, VN backgrounds and facesets that may be custom. They really don't fit well together, especially the VN backgrounds as they have black lines around them from not fitting the window perfectly. The battlers are cute, at least.

  The mapping is either sample maps or dungeon generator with no edits. Thus, lazy, bland, empty and annoying. Especially the size of the dungeon generated maps which are large and devoid of any kind of effort.

  The writing is alright. There's some grammatical errors and a lot of punctuation issues too. The writing is stilted at times and it makes reading it jarring. Seeing as this is part Visual Novel, it really should have had a proof reader.

  The characters are kind of bland. There were one or two who were interesting and while some effort was made to try and make the characters seem different to each other, they fell a bit flat.

  The story was interesting - a land you access by dreaming where you meet those who you know in your life. It's interesting how it bends expectations about who is whom in the dreamland, but again, the writing issues didn't help with conveying the story well.

  Sound is there. Nothing great but nothing too jarring, bar a few sounds that seemed out of place. Music is the same - alright but nothing that's really stand out. It was used well enough for the different scenes but nothing that really enhanced the experience.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consists of battles and on-map interactions.

  The majority of the game is Visual Novel-esque in that you're shown backgrounds with text. Lots of text. You don't get choices in the text - it's just telling you the story and dialogue at you with the characters.

  The dream land portions allow you to move on maps and try to avoid fast-moving enemy sprites that engage in a typical jRPG battle when you hit them. Battles are fairly balanced but nothing to really write home about. You don't learn any new skills, but the skills you do have access to are at least interesting and useful. They usually have other aspects than just damage, like stunning or freezing the enemy.

  The game has an autoload feature which is very annoying, as you can save manually in other spots but it always loads the first slot, meaning that unless you edit the save data you can screw yourself out of a lot of gameplay. There's also no titlescreen or the like - it jumps straight into the game on start-up which was a bit jarring.

  ENGAGEMENT
  The game started out interesting but then we got to the dungeons and battles and it kind of lost itself. I feel like it would have been a lot better if there hadn't been dungeons, just a string of battles or battles interposed between the story. The dungeons just weren't interesting, being that they were either randomly generated dungeons with no visual changes or sample maps, which is the laziest of lazies.

  Honestly, the game had promise where the story was concerned but it was let down by lack of polish and lazy attempts at adding gameplay.

  THEME
  The theme of the game seems to be escapism, where people are trying to remove themselves from the reality of their lives by living in another world in their dreams. Story-wise, it does well to convey this despite the writing issues that plague the game. Mechanically, it also helps a bit - being a dragon with magic powers and able to battle does help convey at least a bit of escapism and it's not lost on the player what is going on so that's a plus.

  46/80