going live with ya game
First, I must say I'm really happy that you reviewed my first RPG project on youtube, thank you very much!
Now second, I also thank you greatly for providing plenty of critique. There's several harsh truths in there which I needed to hear and you presented them in a very polite way. You've given me a lot to think about on how to solve Sword Scroll Saga's issues and improve it!
What pained me more was seeing you get hardlocked right at the start due to a dumb newbie dev mistake from me, basically I forgot to make the fortress tile passable by the player. Fighting and defeating the boss changes it to ruins which I made passable but solving things peacefully leaves it as a regular fort. And the other routes get locked until you complete one (because each route has triggers that affects the others, but if the player could change routes midway, then that would mean triggers getting even more messy).
Now to comment on some things that were less clear:
-The "hearts" that pop up during talks are affection, but not to the characters. They're affection to the weapons themselves, some are sword hearts and other are axe hearts (that's why you still gain it even if you're a jerk). Weapon affection affects a lot of stuff, most noticeable being the background parallaxes. Seems like I need to make the weapons on the heart icons more visible hahaha.
-The idea behind Ethereal Edge and Blade barrage are that they're higher damage attacks available to everybody that however can't be spammed since they make the enemy gains the ability to counter their type. Although yeah, may not be the best idea, gonna think on how to rework those.
-Sword save on merchants is a leftover from previous versions where I tinkered with disabling saving anywhere.
-Basic enemies not dropping money is because I'm aiming at resource management mattering, although you're right they should feel more rewarding, gotta think on that
too.
Everything else you commented on I basically 100% agree with, in particular I really need to explain things in-game better, introduce the player to the custom systems a bit slower, better mapping, more varied dialogue, etc.
For now I released a hotfix for the hardlock problem, hope you can take another shot at Sword Scroll Saga and explore the other areas now. I'll start working on tackling all the other issues you pointed out, thank you very much once more!