Interesting story! I included it in my Touhou Jam 5 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)
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The Phantom's Nightmare's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Concept | #16 | 3.722 | 3.810 |
Audio | #22 | 3.071 | 3.143 |
Gameplay | #27 | 3.024 | 3.095 |
Overall | #33 | 3.024 | 3.095 |
Story/Writing | #33 | 2.326 | 2.381 |
Challenge (Touhou but Fair) | #34 | 2.512 | 2.571 |
Visuals | #35 | 3.071 | 3.143 |
Use of Theme | #47 | 2.140 | 2.190 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
Black Mage (Programmer), Reiss (Art, BGM)
External Asset Credits
Tileset (Ancient Dungeon Base & Jungle ) by Celianna, XAS Script by Xiderowg & Moghunter, Fullscreen Script by Zeus81, YEA Core by Yanfly, and RPG Maker VX Ace RTP.
Comments
This had a great concept going in and it played smooth as butter in certain areas. It's the other areas however that hold it back so much that it's a shame, which is understandable for a jam release. It's mostly execution though, the hitboxes were a tricky thing to fiddle with and the combos didn't seem to have any rhyme or reason, so doing attack math got hard at times. The game built itself up like it was going to be fast-paced slashy fun (with the dash-after-kill mechanic) but got severely hindered by how little stamina you get. With a couple of anti-frustration features though I can see myself dumping a lot of time and addiction into something like this. Nice work!
Was quite surprised to see an action RPG being made in RPG Maker, not every day that you see that sort of thing attempted and for what it is, its really good. The feedback was all there and everything fit together.
I am concerned with the game feel though, just because the stamina recharged too slowly, I assume to deter people from mashing A/Z at everything they see, perhaps it would be better increase the recharge rate but increase the time between attacking and recharging?
Collision detection is also a bit iffy when I would think I'm hitting an enemy and I miss instead. There are also times when I think I can land a hit but I can't, half the time I was still recovering a hit I've sustained myself but there are times when I have stamina but couldn't attack for some reason.
I can tell there were some interesting ideas that were planned but weren't fully integrated in time. Would've liked to see more low health enemies in the same area to appropriately see the on-kill mechanic shine.
Nice idea. I love the title graphic and the Youmu sprite.
The music never played for me, and sometimes Youmu wouldn't attack even when I wasn't stunned and had full stamina.
I just ran past all the enemies and went straight to the boss fight.
the unique HP/MP combat mechanics are interesting (I always forget youmu has a second sword) but the stamina feels extremely restrictive; because of the random damage values you'll sometimes just not do enough to kill an enemy, so you're forced to sit back and wait
I liked the nice music box theme that played, and the art of youmu and the enemies were nice. I had a hard time with combat though, very difficult for me (I liked the premise of it a lot and was cool, especially for an rpg maker game but it just felt weird in the end). Great concept that could be really cool with more time :)
I beat the boss!
I like action games in general and I like your take on combat system where you need to balance your moves based on two resources that enemies have. I also like the fact that you used youmu's twin blade settings. It's often getting ignored in other fangames and I'm very glad to see it here.
However controls and combos are a bit cluncky that I don't really understand how it works. Sometimes I can do a cool combo but sometimes it just slashes once, and boss hitbox seems to be much larger on the bottom side while almost non-existent on the upper side, which was kind of deceiving but it's very easy to kite after I get used to it. Potions and apples in the grass also helped a lot.
Some tips for the boss: it's easier to hit it from bottom after it attacked, and if you have problems with controls I recommend hitting it once or twice per boss attack. It moves very slowly and you can get heals from cutting grasses safely so it's fairly forgiving. Get it around 5 hp and 5 mp then you can just go ahead tanking the hit and finish it with AZ combo.
Although story is underwhelming and it doesn't really ring me a bell about folklore, legends and such, gameplay and design are excellent by themselves.
True, we didn't managed to completely integrate the theme with the game story. We originally want to tell a story about Baku where it eats nightmare and tried to help Youmu out of hers. However we're short of time when we finished most of the game mechanics, thus we only left a very vague presence of Baku at the end of the game.
Thank you for playing!
(If anyone else is having issues starting the game like I did, you need to go into the fonts folder and install the fonts, that fixed it for me)
I liked the game even though I couldn't beat the boss! the concept is cool and the music is very relaxing
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