Thoughts recorded during my playthrough

+ = I liked it

- = I didn't like it

* = Comment/neutral

====================

+ Nice title screen

+ Nice custom window skin & font

+ I'm liking how this game looks so far.

+ I like Erriga's design, both in bust art and character sprite.

+ I also like the tileset. Looks futuristic.

- Erriga thinking to herself "what is taking so long" followed by her saying to Damian "what took you so long" felt redundant.

+ Bust art continues to look good.

- "Garret! I knew you guys were here." That said, it's kind of a weird thing to say to someone when you approach them at a grave site. I guess it works if he's supposed to be oblivious to social norms. If he's being respectful he could say something like "Sorry, am I interrupting?"

- Something about the writing just feels *off.*

+ Nice custom menu

- Small critique: The SP bar gets kinda lost in the characters because they are both are very blue. Like, I can see them fine, but if I'm just glancing at the menu the only SP bar I can easily see is Garret's due to the color contrast.

* I just noticed that the BGM stopped. I guess to show that this is a cemetary and we should be moving on?

+ BGM resumes in the next area. Yay!

- Comma after "here" is redundant. I'm also noticing the occasional extra space in the text, such as between "here, and." I suspect you are using word wrap (and if so, hooray!), so when you are writing the dialog and you need to go to a new line don't add a space at the end of the text. Alternately, you could set the "LInk Break -> Space" parameter to "false."

- "without" is misspelled.

- Should be "Your."

+ Props for including an automatic heal at the starting point of the battle zone.

+ The battle layout is cool! I love the not-first-person front view. The characters even get their own attack motion animations.

- It's nitpicky, but it should be "you'd." They figured it out, so now it's in the past. You *would,* rather than you *will.*

- I don't really ever get enough overdrive points to use the overdrive skills. In fact, it seems like the battle strategy basically boils down to spamming Attack and occasionally popping a boost. While the battles overall are not long or hard, it just feels bland.

* Garret's AOE spells are pretty strong. This is good because it means I can speed through the battles pretty easily, but the drawback is that there's still not much strategy.

- Couldn't get a screenshot of it, but it's spelled "electrocute."

- Boss just nuked Drago out of nowhere and there's no way to revive him.

+ At least he gets revived at the end of the battle and still gets the XP from the battle.

* Would be nice if the KO'd characters had a different pose

- It would be nice if we could go back to town at any time during the mission, not just the end.

- While the battle layout generally looks great, there are issues like this: the turn order UI gets in the way of the enemies' HP bars.

- My battle strategy now is "everyone guards while Garret spams OP AOE spells." While I appreciate that this means the battles go pretty quick, it's pretty boring too.

- The power up animation that plays before every spell gets annoying after a while too.

* Lava boss just nuked Garret in one hit. At least Drago was able to revive him right away.

- Inferno hits for way too much damage.

* At least Magic Reflect seems to be effective

* So the lava boss is a one-note encounter. It's a *different* note from the other battles, which is good, but it comes across as unfair until you figure out the secret, and then it's just uninteresting after that.

Watch out for spacing issues when using word wrap. This happens because you typed this:

"A bangle enchanted with protective

magic."

But because word wrap ignores typed "enter" keys, it merges the text together. You can fix this either by adding a space before pressing Enter when typing descriptions, or by turning description word wrap off.

* Aside from accessories, most of the equipment we get from treasure chests are parts for Rane. Why not something for the rest of the cast?

- There are accessories to guard against status ailments, but I'm on the ship and I still haven't encountered any enemies that inflict those statuses.

- "Star" has too many r's.

- Not including a screenshot for this next one as it is a spoiler, but there's a big reveal at the end but it's got some typos and grammar errors. Message me if you want the details.

- It's a nitpick, but the credits scroll is pretty slow.

Summary

This game has some cool concepts but it's otherwise painfully straightforward. It seems like most of the development time went into making the game look nice but the actual gameplay wasn't really thought out. I recommend focusing on making gameplay interesting first, then layer the look and story on top of it.

The story is OK too but the characters need more personality. Keep working on ways to express character through dialog and actions efficiently, and consider giving the characters opportunities to experience some growth and drama.

After defeating the bosses give cancel option in the dialogue maybe someone wanted to search the area more.
For the story, beating the girl didn't seem so hard that Syran needed the help of four heroes ;)
I didn't get how useful the Overdrive is and the characters weren't balanced to each other but the battle view from behind I liked it.
And the prices were expensive.

https://odysee.com/$/embed/stkn/4f00735c0cb3c1558bff1c65c9c590d0dcc45b42?r=7ftC221JsX72NcPpTnTdBxox1M6qTuV3

So I beat your game within around 35 minutes. I've taken a lot of notes so I hope this provides you better insight on areas you can improve on. I will be completely honest so I hope you don't take things personally.

• I like the custom battle art and portrait art. I looked at your other games and I see some improvement. So if you keep this up, I can see you making quality artwork within a few years.
• The free healing at anytime is a good addition. It saves the hassle; especially for shorter games.
• The first cutscene ends too quickly. I was expecting to take control until the screen faded and jumped to another cutscene. I think you could either remove that portion or at least give the player a better tease of what's to come. I felt that there was a missed potential there.
• Lance's death means nothing to the player because there was no character development for Garret. We don't know who Garret is nor how great of a brother Lance was.
• If you're going to use text to label buildings (Divine Blades Guild), it should be consistent with every other building like the shops.
• The whole "You shouldn't enter someone's home without permission" discourages players from exploring. You can be a bit more creative. For example, in Earthbound, you can't enter some buildings but they have fun dialogue regardless (like XXXsterday referencing the Beatles).
• For the dialogue, you need to do a bit more "show" rather than "tell". If you study how movies do cutscenes, you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
• I think the dialogue sounds unnatural in certain parts of the script. Think about how conversations happen in real life. Do people always point out the obvious? When they do, it's usually a joke ("No sh*t Sherlock"). In your game, however, it's taken seriously.
• It would help if the monsters on the map have a visual indicator when you're spotted like an exclamation mark.
• On maps, the corridors need to be expanded or the monster's field of vision needs to be narrower. It feels like encounters are unavoidable.
• The maps are like a long maze sometimes. You can definitely cut down on the length of some paths. In older games, they did this because of random encounters and artificially increasing playtime.
• The battles seemed a bit too easy for me. I'm playing on normal difficulty and I was holding the confirm key and attacking to win (I beat the first 2 bosses by attacking only). It wasn't until the Volcanic area's boss where I needed to use Reflect to avoid getting 1 shotted.
• For the last crystal, I think you should have allowed the player to interact an event to start the cutscene rather than having it autostart. I usually enter the room and save before the boss fight but for this one, Damin attacked me and I had no chance to save.
• Ravager is way too broken because it kills 3 party members, it can't be reflected and there's no signal to indicate that Erriga going to use it so I don't know when to guard. When I restarted the fight, that was the first thing she used and it was really annoying. The only reason I won is because I was lucky enough to have one battle where she didn't use it.
• The reveal that Damin is Garret's brother was unexpected, but it doesn't really make sense. So who's Lance then? This basically makes the first cutscene a waste of time.
• I felt like the only person who had a slight bit of character development was Garret. The other party members felt like they were just there for the sake of having support in battle.

So the biggest thing I noticed is that you're lacking a novelty for your game. What makes your game special compared to other games? Is it a fresh and interesting story? The stylish graphics? The fun and unique gameplay mechanic? It's this missing piece that can cause your game to get overlooked because it feels generic.

If you want to become a better storyteller, I highly recommend studying the Hero's Journey. It provides a good structure for story arcs and character development. You should also learn the different archetypes for characters. Usually there's a hero and a villain but there's also the messenger, mentor, shapeshifter, etc.

I hope this provided you good feedback to learn from. Goodluck with your future projects!

Made it through, bug and crash free! Always a relief. I thought the art was really good, and the front view combat with battlers was a nice touch. I'd love to see that style developed for future games! Lots of things I'm sure you could make happen with time. I'd be happy to show you some action sequences you could use to create the illusion of characters moving away.

Length seemed about right if players don't fight too much. I chose hard and I was still typically able to spam the same magic to win.

- Combat needs more diversity! I'd  love to see more strategy than elements, buffs, and attack.

-Garret carries the whole team. He's OP while the rest of the group is just there.

-Reflect is a bit OP too. It let me totally wreck bosses on hard with very little leveling. How about reflect on just one character and not many?

- Frontview battle is cool, but I'm sure you can see some of the default action sequencing needs some adjusting to make it more natural and fluid. 

Keep jamming Rose!

okay that has got to be the sickest looking sword ever! what inspired you???

Hi Rose, I just finished your game. I really like your art. It's super impressive that you got so much art done in a month. The title screen music is awesome, and the rest of the music is pretty good as well. I also really like the battle setup you went with. I've not seen this very often, so it's pretty unique to see this.

The story was basic, but that's not necessarily bad. I do wish we would have some more connection to the rest of the party or world (through dialogue for example). After the crash, I tried talking to the other guild members, but was ignored. :(

The mapping ranged from basic to decent. Some of them would have benefited from being a little smaller or more decorated. The later dungeons especially were a bit boring to look at. I did like your dungeons layout. It wasn't too maze like, while also not being too linear. There were also a couple of map errors: the wall border was missing in the second part of the crypt and both the ice cave and fire cave had irregular wall heights. There's also a passabilty error in the ice cave and the forest (I could walk on the tree top autotile).

I have to agree with Kishi that it's really strange Garret has so many more skills than everyone else and that he ends up having better healing skills than the healer. He also seems to be alot stronger than everyone else: at the time that he was dealing 100+ damage, all the others were only dealing 30-50 damage. 

The ice dungeon is a lot easier than the fire dungeon, because so many characters have a fire skill, but only Garret has the ice skill. Drago nearly died a couple of times in the fire dungeon. Also, there's no Wind skill?

I have to admit it looks a bit off in the credits when you have graphics and nothing mentioned and then move on to sprites etc. I think it would look better if graphics was capitalized, that way people won't get confused. I also believe that you should mention you made the actor battlers and portraits. Give yourself credit there ;)

I found a bunch of typos. I'll list them below (in the order that I encountered them):

• I knew you guys "would be" here
• "bottom" of the well
• "without" (tried entering the houses)
• "Your" clothes (Rane says this)
• "immitate"
• It looks "like" we found the crystal
• "It's best not to wander"
• "maybe" (Upon meeting Erriga)
• "introduced", "brainwashed", "star" (after battle)
• I'm "your" brother. We looked "everywhere" for you, "assumed"
• They "have been" gone, "deserve"

Anyway, I had fun playing the game. Congrats :D

Great job on using the plugins to their advantage! The music being different is a nice change of pace. I really liked how you used the SV Battlers to create the illusion of third-person battles. Those are also some decent drawings!

Here are some issues:

• Title screen layout needs work, you could learn a little about the rule of thirds and related info about design.
• Don't really like how the trees in the forest dungeon are represented
• Some enemies managed to walk in the wall, check on the layering.
• In the final level, I managed to walk through and into these blue panels and go inside the walls
• Characters in battle could use some aligning. Garrett is taking on the pixels of another sprite on some frames, too. And his hair is miscolored in his idle animation.
• In the credits, no one is credited under Graphics
• Character movesets don't make sense (I played Hard mode)
  • Elrod is a melee unit that somehow has a stronger MAT than ATK with the spear equipped.
  • Elrod has a skill that says deals 20 damage, but it still scales like any other skill.
  • Rane has the same spells as Drago but more, despite him being the healer.
  • Maybe Drago should be given Cure instead of Elrod.
  • Why is Garett the first to get AoE Magic Attacks? The whole party is at level 6 at this point, btw. He even has stronger healing than Drago.
  • Garett overshadows everyone with his moveset being way too diverse and powerful compared to the rest of the party.

Thanks, I had fun here, 4/5

First impressions, not bad. Although it is the default title screen and such, I appreciate the drawn character busts and different menu music. A different or painted original title screen would do better. I liked that you gave difficulty levels.

Into the game, I loved the characters sprites and busts and the effort into creating these. Story is easy to follow along and the knight-like setting is great, though I would love to interact with the environment more, like the graveyard. Sound design-wise, there can be further improvements. I would appreciate footsteps, original transitions SFX and more. Mapping and transitions are decent and can be adjusted.

Combat-wise, it's great and has a lot of potentials. I see that you made your own battling animations for characters and enemies which is great to see! Enemies have a lot of work in them too. Although I was lost by the number of skill types and didn't know what boost did at first.

I will play more after I review a few others.

Overall, I'm giving this a strong 3/5. You have a lot of room to improve and I'm hoping to see what you do in the future! Please keep going strong and follow your heart.