I really enjoyed my time with Adventure of Changes. I spent about 97(!!!) hours playing through the game, according to the RPGMaker save screen, and found every transformation. I missed some things - never found out where to fix the smartphone, never entered the building in the north-center of the tundra, and missed some demons (the special form from the final dungeon and the Ankh transformation) - and I have no intention of doing a New Game + playthrough, but I feel very fulfilled with what I did see. Exploring the world, and gaining new tools to do so through the various transformations was a lot of fun, and I liked seeing what new combat style each transformation had even if I never intended to use them. I really liked the slime, alraune, and mermaid transformations visually, with special mention to manticore and dragon for their interesting combat styles.
There are a lot of areas where the game could use another pass for grammar and spelling, though. Especially during the prologue, but also scattered throughout the game. There are also some text boxes where the text is cut off part-way through, though thankfully it was never enough to make things confusing or hard to understand.
The balance of combat is also very weird. Some enemies are extremely dangerous and can wipe out a level 50 team in one turn, even in thoroughly explored areas. But on the other hand, certain skills (especially the skill that gets stronger with each beehive you recruit) can completely destroy any encounter in one turn. Including bosses. I found an absurd amount of success in using the Sword skills and using the buffs from it to then use a spell that hits every enemy multiple times to instantly kill normal enemies. I did only play on Normal difficulty, though. Maybe the game is hard enough on Hard and Lunatic to warrant these kinds of strategies, and I just tried too hard for Normal difficulty.
Animations also take forever, especially in human form with Full Support. I do really appreciate the option to use Full Support - it saves a ton of time and brain power when grinding combat encounters - but maybe a way to turn off animations would be good? I have seen that in other RPGMaker games. Definitely not something needed in an already complete game, though. RPGMaker is just like that.
All that aside, none of it was enough to make me consider putting the game down. I just wanted to keep going to see what the next transformation was, to find out how it would re-contextualize everywhere I had already been with a new traversal ability. And while the story is generally fairly standard for a fantasy RPG, the aspect of there being another big fantasy adventure in the world's recent history was a pretty interesting aspect. I have to ask, is the adventure of the Orbs of Phantasm an actual game/story, or just something for the backstory of this game? Either way it's pretty interesting.
I'm glad I played this game, and I'm definitely going to check out Journey of Transformation next. Thank you so much for making it.
