Wow, this game turned out to be a lot better than I expected! Well done!
Pros:
- The pacing of the story is good;
- The combat is good with good difficulty. I defeated the last boss with one character left. Which is what you would expect from a boss;
- Music is fine;
- Visuals are good (I'm not familiar with RPGMaker, so I don't know how much of it is your work);
- Level design is well done (Though I got stuck for a bit in the first part with water because I didn't know you can climb vines);
- Dialog is good;
- The humor is good. I like the characters being aware of being very archetipical :D
- The fact you have 2 options in dialogue, 1 being the normal one and the other being funny makes you want to play the game again to see what the character will say. What you usually see in RPGs is to options with no real difference. Very good!
- The magic cave itself is a very cool concept. A cave that "spawns" anywere in the world. Gets you interested right from the start;
- The village part is very well done! First of all you don't expect a village inside the cave, so it's a nice surprise that will make the players interested in what is the next "stage". Second, it is completely empty, except for the chickens which makes you interested in what is happening (Where people went? Are the chicken transformed villagers? Maybe is a village of chickens!). The best parts of a story oftenly don't have dialog! This specific part makes me remember Mario RPG where in one village the villagers are paralyzed and in another they act very strangely (Yaridovich). It would be cool if you could steal some stuff in the shops and develop some kind of sub-plot with it depending on your actions. Third, one party member is added to your party as a chicken so it gets you curious about his true form. I tried to trick the game saving the file as chickens to see if the save file would have his true form, but nope. Just 2 chickens hahaha :D
- The part where you are a chicken and can't fight breaks the pacing from fighting to evading enemies in the map. It also has some chests that you don't know if you will have the opportunity to get later, which is nice;
Cons:
- Characters are a bit shallow as you pointed out in the closing scene. It's common in JRPGs though because of the younger audience, so it really depends on what you are aiming for;
- The name of the game is pretty uninteresting. It is good that it references an interesting part of the game, but from the name it sounds like it is just a random cave with some magic monsters and magic loot in it, not that the cave itself has magic properties;
- There is some text that is not well translated to english, and some that are in spanish. Not a big problem to me personally since I speak portuguese and the few words in spanish were similar to portuguese. Just to let you know;
- The game gives too much story in the begging. This is a problem in two ways: First you are telling stuff to the player about a character he doesn't care about yet. You need to make the player care about a character before telling stuff about him. Second in the start of the game, the player is expeted to be eager to play the game, so it is usually better to give some gameplay before going for story (I'm not saying to remove the intro completely, just make it shorter). Third, this specific story is better saved for later. You are getting too deep into the character telling stuff about his father and mother right from the start. You could have just told the player that the protagonist is a young guy searching for his father who is the first to have entered the cave, and both would look badass enough (the young adventurer and the pioneer) to get the player invested. Later if the protagonist finds his father you can reveal the part about his mother sickness and at the same time develop something from it (maybe the protagonist doesn't forgive his father for abandoning his mother saying that she had a miserable life being sick without the care of her husband, maybe he is just happy he found his father and they both how their lives have been since he left, maybe he never finds his father). In any case it is usually better to tell specific parts of the backstory when they become relevant or when they will be more impactful/surprising/[put-the-emotion-you-want-to-convey];
- The first earth spirit seemed to help them for no particular reason;
- The game has very typical RPGMaker visuals, which make it hard to stand out in the crowd. Remember that the first thing people will experience in your game is the screenshots, thumpnails, and the title (or word of mouth if your game/franchise is already successful). You can only give a first impression once though so if your game doesn't stand out visually it is possible that a lot of people will never experience the story/gameplay/characters you worked so hard to craft;
- Not really a "con", but I'm not a big fan of random encounters, because you have no control over it. It can get annoying if you are backtracking, for example. A good example of a game that handles encounters well is Paper Mario, where you can control not just when to engage in battle but also you can start a battle with an attack from the overworld;
- Also not a "con" but the game has pretty standard combat. It really depends what the focus of your game is, but usually great RPGs come with their own unique combat mechanic. From simpler ones like Bravely Default cumulative actions to wierder ones like Undertale's mini bullet-hell;
- Like I said earlier I got stuck in the beggining and in another instance I found out I had to jump from the cliff to the roof of the house completely by accident. I had not much else to go in both cases so it wasn't much of a problem. Also getting stuck is sometimes part of the fun. Just letting you know.
This review ended up being a lot longer than the others because the content of your game was very diverse. Good game!