Hi there!

I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.

All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.

I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.

Here's the VOD:

My thoughts about "An RPG without How-To-Play":
Thank you for making this game! It had a lot of systems in it, to help try and support its open world style of gameplay, as the party explored an overworld, and navigated towns and cities, engaging in an investment process in each city, which involves putting items into personal stashes and something akin to selling? I didn't get that far to figure out how it all worked within the hour allotted for judging. But Suffice to say, there were very many custom systems in this game!

The programming behind the tactical battles and many of the other systems in the game was quite impressive. It must have taken a lot of time and effort to get those thoroughly scripted systems up and going. They seem to be very well technically programmed, and required a lot of skills to create. The game seemed to have a good vision of a game where a tactical grid was employed, and the squares that you choose to target would be a central part of the strategic process.

However, it was difficult for me to understand how to play in a way that was in concordance with the design of the game. I often found myself lost on map, battles would be rather straightforward, and then suddenly I would experience a spike in difficulty, not knowing why a certain monster would defeat me in a few hits. I also think that despite the gamepage claiming that there was an emotional story to be played, I did not seem to find that emotional story within the first hour of playing. A lot of my hour of playing was wandering around and fighting battles. The grid system held a lot of potential for the tactics-based games, but one could say I found it difficult to find the emotional hooks in the game. And if there are no emotional hooks, at least I feel the gameplay should be solid enough to stand on its own, but many of the systems were not exercised to their full potential.

There is a version of this game might be very cool. One of the easy fixes is adding a lot more equipment and items, and strewing them about, to provide interesting usage of healing items and other kinds of items, and equipment that you can customise for each hero. However, I oftentimes found myself with not enough money to buy much at all, and I wasn't able to figure out how to properly use the mini resource management/investment/sales game inside each town. If there were more potions, for example, there would be more interesting and strategic decisions for each battle, to decide whether to attack or to heal, etc. But I often found that battles were a trivial process most of the time, and if you came up against a monster that was extremely higher than yours, all you had available to you was to escape.

I think I found out that each of the resource management minigames were localised to each town, but I wasn't able to figure when something would sell, or how to collect the money, or anything like that. It could be due to my lack of skill in understanding this system, but it would be easier, I feel, if it were explained a bit better or made a little more intuitive, because understanding didn't come quick to me on this front.

There was also sometimes a difficulty in perceiving what things did, due to the UI of the battle system, for example. HP and MP bars for the actors were very small, and oftentimes the log in the top-left part of the screen for the battles did not display information in a way I felt I could understand very easily. It faded as it went up, and it kind of overlapped the monsters, and made it sort of feel a bit unprofessional. As well as the "Speed Accumulation" table to the bottom right of the battle screen, I didn't feel like I understood what that meant. I felt like it could be something to do with turn order and speed, but I was left unsure about that. Sometimes battle systems use a turn order mechanism for that, such as a string of icons representing user turns. Anything more seems to be a bit confusing to me.

All in all, I think I just felt like there might be a better game buried in the systems here. A vast open world game like this can often leave a lot of room for misinterpretation, and I gladly accept the possibility that I misinterpreted a lot of this game's ideals and mechanics. But for me, I have to judge honestly and only within my experience of that hour judged that I oftentimes was left a bit bamboozled or buried in some repetitive structures without an emotional hook to attach onto in this game.

Regardless, there is a lot of promise here. I think there is a possibility for an amazing game here if it is refined, if it is polished a little, and made simpler to perceive, and perhaps to add some emotional hook to attach onto that is earlier on in the game, rather than past the 1 hour mark. Thank you for making this game! Every game is a gift, and I thank you for giving us this one.