https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xk13MBq9PjfYjq2Z6mGYmA860nGNDorpbQF7kuYR9Hk/...
I'm jumping the gun a little and testing some of the early entries! The link above is a Google Doc with my real-time thoughts.
So, I have a lot of experience in the genre. Iāve played all kinds of RPGs from the NES all the way to the modern era with recent releases, Iāve played dozens and dozens of different RPGs made with huge budgets, as well as tiny projects made by only one person on an engine like RPG Maker, and I even spent three years in charge of a community dedicated to playtesting RPGs like this one. The reason I bring this up is to make it clear that I am not a āhaterā who doesnāt enjoy random encounters or turn based combat.
With that said, this title is very rough. The characters lack personality, the plot moves very slowly and consisted largely of fetchquests by volume, the combat lacks depth and is incredibly unbalanced (Sky Ninja is so substantially stronger than Xania in every way that it began to feel like the latter was most useful as a meat shield), and the world design is poorly planned and occasionally feels arbitrary. While I can see some of the inspirations of this game, it feels like lessons werenāt taken from the great RPGs of the SNES era, neither from their strengths nor expanding upon their weaknesses. The title feels surface level as an RPG, the sort of thing that someone with a very rudimentary understanding of the genre might make in an attempt at illustrating its perceived shortcomings. I did see that the game page lists this as a parody of RPGs, citing a variety of different inspirations, but that inspiration isnāt really shining through here. Even the parody angle, with the Spaceballs influence, doesnāt really seem to show through in this game for me. There were a couple of jokes here and there, unfortunately none of which were especially to my taste, but it never really had the sort of biting wit and satire that you would expect of a self-aware parody. The concept of āSpaceballs for RPGsā isnāt exactly unheard of, there has been a lot of energy on the internet directed towards pointing out the funny inconsistencies and quirks of the genre, but I saw very little of that here. Instead, it was mostly just chasing NPCs as they ran around town in random directions, waiting until I found the right one to progress the story, after which point the narrative about traitors would proceed for a couple sentences while taking itself dead serious, and then itās back to looking around for the right NPC to talk to. It is possible that much of the humour lies in the other NPCs, but I talked to a good few of them out of necessity in order to find the one Iām supposed to talk to, and rarely found any humour in it, nor any insight about the characters or plot beyond basic lip service to the conflict at hand. The game does not have to be funny, of course, but if itās meant to be a parody then a steady flow of humour is generally expected.
If humour isnāt the goal, Iām not sure what is. It does not feel like your passions and efforts went into dungeon design, combat encounters, or even the art. Perhaps there is a deep character driven narrative hiding in all of this instead, in which case itād be ideal if that was given some more focus. As the game is right now, however, itās hard to see what its goals are, but a decent rule of thumb would be that if itās in the game right now, it could probably use a second pass. I know this is very harsh, which is unfortunate as I was very excited to play one of the few JRPGs submitted so far, but it is out of a desire to see titles like this reach their potential. I trust that you really do want to create this self-aware love letter to SNES RPGs, but right now that desire isnāt reaching the page.