itch.io

Don't worry, nothing mean. :-)

First, it's a huge relief being able to shoot projectiles now. I've done challenge runs in the past as a mage and as you can imagine, the biggest challenge is the limitation the original engine had on spawning spells as physical objects. It's making me look forward to an archer run. 

An interesting result of playing a mage, though, is that I was able to beat the game without having to defeat Tyball. I suspect I didn't have to free Ariel either. There are a few doors which are supposed to be restricted from opening with the Open spell but aren't, crucially the doors opened by the key Tyball drops. I broke the orb, ran past him and unlocked his lab (as well as Ariel's prison along the way), and was able to continue to beat the game. You still need to bury Garamon's bones or the talismans don't disappear into the lava, but there aren't any other event flags keeping you from burying him if you don't kill Tyball.

I already mentioned the item duplication and attribute bugs in two other posts. Here are some others that I noticed: 

• Fishing is very finicky. I'm not sure if you restricted fishing to larger bodies of water, but even then it seemed it was very hard to get it to actually work. 
• Stacked items don't accumulate weight. 
• The bandit leader never warmed up to me no matter the disposition of the two bandits outside their quarters. 
• It felt like there weren't nearly as many skill points to spend. I haven't tested this yet compared to the rate at which you're supposed to earn them, but that's on my to-do list.
• Nothing could go into map cases, you could only take things out of them. 
• Neither electric bolt nor fireball had an area of effect like sheet lightning or flame wave. Not sure if this is intentional to avoid destroying items and thereby bypass the issue of piles of ashes with unlimited uses like in the original. That being said, those area of effect spells didn't damage items either.
• Goblins on level 7 disappear after showing them the medallion. That made it so there were some gates I could only pass once. 
• Many cutscenes played very slow, unless I right clicked in which case they played at hyper speed. 

That's all I could think of off the top of my head. With that small a list out of a million details that could go wrong, I'd say this is one fine piece of work!

Next up, some improvements I really liked: 

• Being able to move map notes made it way easier to place them where they're actually needed. UU has one of the best auto maps already, and this was a definite step up.
• Showing the available skill points in the character stats screen kept me from wasting time traveling to a shrine.
• Lore felt more reliable. Not sure if that was intentional, but it was nice in this playthrough.
• Jumping was far easier without all the bouncing. 
• I like the graphics. It's a nice mix of "realistic" models and pixelated environments.
• I think everyone appreciates the larger field of view compared to the original.

Finally, some suggestions. 

• The reduced UI is nice, but I could have benefited from seeing my mana and rune shelf. Maybe something in the options to toggle persistent UI elements?
• I would really appreciate a point buy option for the attributes. I hated rerolling then, and I hate it now.
• Some messages disappeared before I could read them. A short log you can go back through would be helpful. 

That's all for now! Once again, awesome work.