itch.io

Polished, atmospheric, and exceptionally original. A well-crafted experience only held back by the battle system IMO. Good job overall with this update!

Clever systems, funny, (aside from a few MGS memes that I didn't understand) and nails the Game Boy visual + auditory motif convincingly.

Great to see a definitive edition for this, and I hope to see these concepts used in a larger project in the future!
HINT HINT

Fun, challenging, and surprisingly charming. Would love to see a full version of this.

Great work!

Hi Typical_Name! Thanks for your comments!

The Panacea issue is a problem with the item description accuracy rather than a bug specifically. I will try to address that in a future update, but the gist of it is that Curse is supposed to be the "ultimate" debuff that only an Elixir can remove, yet that caveat got left off of some item and skill descriptions. A Curse spell is available to the player as well - but is well hidden - and causes the targets to take additional damage, while lowering many of their attributes significantly.

Defeating the final boss unlocks a specific feature that can be brought into a new run. I don't want to give too much away, but that information is crucial to seeing the "true" ending and breaking the cycle.

As far as the upgrade system goes, there is a bug/exploit that is possible to achieve with the scenario you mentioned. It's sort of a technical limitation with the engine, though I don't know if I would patch it out regardless as some players really dig those sorts of things. I'm glad you like the Mana Bolt skill! I think it flies under the radar a lot but is quite effective and supports a lot of builds. (that said, once you unlock a few specific upgrades I think you might replace it eventually :) )

Heyyyyyy! Glad you were able to close out the trilogy.

Yes, the jam format was the game's biggest (but certainly not only!) weakness, and I learned a ton of stuff both about scope control and about how I would want to implement this system within a larger project, should the opportunity arise later.

The Extended Haroldverse and ever-present cameos are one of my favorite things about this series, and I plan to keep some aspect of that alive however "TBA" comes together.

But yeah, all your points are valid, and I've heard several other concerns about not being able to take full advantage of the full cast due to the investment issue (skill levels and permanent skill learning, etc.) I also could have explained pretty much everything related to Attunement and Equip skills about 10x better.

Thanks for playing and sharing your insights!

Hi Human!

I'm glad you enjoyed the first 45 minutes and eagerly await your thoughts on the rest of the game :D

I actually tried to make this one shorter, I promise! Though I didn't account for how much the new turn system extended battles, among other things. That said, I am planning on doing something completely different next time and will accept your challenge regarding whatever time constraints are imposed.

Followers of the HBW continuity probably got more out of the intro than new players, but I think it was worth it. And Oath Games absolutely nailed the tiles and retro character sprites for the other areas!

Everything else I will leave to you to discover since your playthrough is still ongoing.

Thanks a ton for playing!

Hi LegoNenen,

Thanks for checking out the game, and sorry to hear you got some lag! I didn't go too crazy with the lighting on this one, but I have a feeling it was likely what caused performance issues on your PC. Can I assume it was mostly out of combat or did you see lag in battles too?

I think the skill equip system needed a better tutorial but I ran out of time. While any character can use / learn any skill, some types of skills (body, head, and arm slots) are exclusive, so you may have run into that issue at some point. But if you experienced a different problem and can recall any details I'd be happy to look further into it once the ratings are done.

The story probably would have had a bit more weight playing the earlier installments, but this was definitely not the most plot-heavy game, as a lot of dialog had to be cut for time.

I'm glad the turn system was at least intuitive enough to figure out, even if not immediately.

I appreciate your feedback!

Thanks for playing Reim!

Yes, regrettably the game is much longer than I had aimed for, so I am hoping folks see the disclaimer on the page to only rate the first 45 minutes (but I will be happy if they enjoy the entire experience after submitting their reviews, of course!)

Oath Games did the sprite work for everything after the "shift", and I absolutely love how it turned out.

I do hope to utilize the skills-as-equipment system in a future project. If you have any thoughts on how that system could be made friendlier to players that are uh... averse to spending resources, I'd be glad to hear that perspective.

Much appreciated!

Thanks for playing and for the detailed feedback Frogboy!

Your surmise was kind of correct in that this game was essentially a prototype for a system I am considering in the future for a full-length project. I anticipated it might be too big or over-scoped in a few ways, but also made some miscalculations in terms of fight length and pacing to boot, having had to trim a lot of story and dialogue because the game was already running long.

While I think the mechanics turned out OK, and some players were very invested, others were put off by the level of complexity given the jam format, which is understandable.

Glad you were able to give the game a try and found some elements to be enjoyable!

Thanks for playing Gensun!

It certainly was too big for a jam for reasons you may be familiar with by now (TLDR: it's a prototype for a system I might use later). I'm grateful you were able to drop 25 minutes - or any time at all, really - into giving it a try.

Hey there! Thanks a ton for playing and for the great feedback!

I do want to show a bit more of the confrontation towards the end of the prologue, and if I can find a way to smooth the transition into the main party as well, I think that's a solid suggestion.

The demo (the version submitted to the Feedback Quest jam) used to end right after the final cutscene that closes out Chapter 1, but I wanted to give players a bit more of a preview of the game world by opening up the beginning of Chapter 2. As a result, the game currently ends at an awkward spot, until I get back on the horse and release more content :)

Seeing your LP of the project was great fun. Thank you for all the awesome content!

Totally fair! I definitely have similar regrets when it comes to the format of my entry for this jam but also don't plan to make any revisions - those will be lessons learned for a future project.

I did see that the mages had a different barrier skill name than the first boss, but without a State pop-up or tooltip advising how it was different, I didn't connect those dots.

I'll look forward to seeing a boss rush style game one of these days, perhaps?

I liked the custom art, icons, and menus, but the art style kind of clashed with the RTP in my opinion. Not sure if there would have been a way to address that without a significant scope increase in either sourcing or drawing new tiles, but it's something to consider.

Tonally the bust/character art also clashed with the very dramatic music and dark-fantasy-inspired gear and skill names. As well as the story, come to think of it, but I'm less sure on that because I got a somewhat goofy vibe from the writing at times (not sure if it was intended). David seemed one-dimensionally arrogant, and Davina was almost exclusively a foil for that personality. I did get more "character" from the HTML crew, mostly along the familiar tropey lines we normally see them as.

A pretty basic "you're the bad guys" scenario which isn't bad per se, but it wasn't executed in such a manner that made me excited to see what happened next. I didn't get to the very end, because the enemies were very spongy and combat got repetitive quickly, with a slow trickle of new skills and occasional side-grade Equipment not being enough to keep me invested. A lot of things felt "off" in terms of battle balance, and many of the skills dealt exaggerated numbers of hits, so it was tough to parse how much damage was actually being done at any given time.

I actually liked being required to use Dispel Strike on the first boss, unlike some of the reviews I read after my playthrough. To me that was one of the better aspects of the battle system, and I wish there were more interactions like that instead of pure big-number spam.

Playing as a demon with an innate weakness to fire felt bad, and the fire mages liked to dogpile that character with their strongest skill. It wasn't unmanageable, just sort of a chore, as was learning that the Glass of Water item didn't provide any protection against being re-burned immediately, so it was almost pointless to use. Having to then Dispel Strike each fire mage in turn felt like just a more tedious version of the preceding boss fight, unfortunately. I think a new gimmick for that battle would've been advisable.

Overall I think this game might have benefited from being reformatted into a boss rush. There were a lot of encounters and most of them semi-trivial, which felt somewhat padded, but I could see it being quite fun given some streamlining and re-focusing.

I got to punch a god in the face with the power of friendship / 5.

A very clever way to make a point about cooldowns. I think you defended your thesis adequately - not a home run, as the game doesn't hold up as well as re: Punch or RATD in terms of strategic depth, but the character variety was (mostly) a plus and there were still a lot of cool interactions.

Balance among characters was a spot that I felt could've used improvement, as well as conveying what certain things did a bit more clearly. For example, playing against Therese was a nightmare unless you'd used her beforehand, as it was unclear what triggered a very specific ability of hers. Oldhar felt amazingly OP as befit a "boss" character, but it at least felt earned, unlike the Reid exploit that was just game-breaking and unfortunately took away from otherwise clever design.

The music was great and I liked that most characters had unique themes.

RTP graphics felt OK but the missing animations took away a lot of the "impact" from battles IMO. I would have included them but set the defaults in YEP battle core (or whatever the MV equivalent is) to Fastest speed. Just my preference.

The interwoven story was one of the best parts. I almost didn't play the unlockable characters but felt obligated to see their story lines and am very glad I did. I don't think there was as much humor or heart as in your more traditional RPGs, but that felt partly due to the tournament format.

A few minor bugs: One of Harold's skills has a typo regarding the type of damage avoided, and there are some "phantom" character selections available from the player select screen.

There's a lot going on with this.

I'll start by saying the presentation is generally quite good and there's a lot of polish in some areas, though some things are comparatively wonky (like the Transfer events in the driving section that can be skipped, allowing the player to drive infinitely off-screen with a control scheme that is extremely difficult to guide when you can't see what direction the actor is facing).

From a technical perspective there's obviously a very strong command of the engine. It's from a design perspective where I am less sold as there are some good decisions alongside some questionable ones.

Sound design in terms of SE, ME, etc. is solid. But the music choices I did not like whatsoever as they both sounded bad (to me) in a vacuum and also undercut the generally cute vibe of the graphics. Not sure if it's older RM compression or all the music tracks selected had an odd "tinny" sound to them, but it wasn't pleasant.

Visually it's kind of cozy, and Harold is the familiar lovable buffoon with a sort of innocence to him, but the narrator and Marsha have potty mouth issues. The narrative and stylistic clashes may be intentional, but I don't think they particularly land. That said, the art is pretty amazing.

I don't know if there's any way to stop this from happening in 2k2/3 but if you press right during actor battle command input it skips that actor's turn, which is unfortunate because I first thought that it might be some sort of free turn battle only to find it's just a waste of an action. Marsha's skill list is interesting but I'm not sold on her action economy - taking a lot of turns off to forage would make sense if her skills were a bit more impactful. But I guess she's also more flexible, so it's still reasonably balanced in that sense.

I won't harp too much on having random battles in the middle of a puzzle section as it's been covered in other discussions. Being able to run with (that I can tell) 100% success is a semi-mitigating factor, but it's not perfect. The sign puzzle itself is pretty clever and a good use of having a nonverbal visual media direct the player. Same with the wind puzzle and audio cues. The stone puzzle felt like an easier version of the sign puzzle, but it was "fine".

The mansion goes on for quite a while too long and combat doesn't feel great with the overzealous level scaling and slow trickle of new skills not quite offsetting an otherwise perfunctory battle system. Losing occasional turns to the battle command issue is also a drain on patience. Yeah, the entire second floor was unnecessary now that I'm through it. It's super repetitive and doesn't add much of anything. Fights aren't tricky, they're just kind of slow and drain resources. And the only things you get besides new skills are the ability to buy more granola potions - er, bars. It's kind of funny that the characters complained about that episode being a chore, because it sort of was. So I have to award a partial point back for the double meaning, intentional or not.

The final battle was pretty decent and encouraged using a variety of skills. Skills that kept the boss locked down or debuffed had priority, but there was a sense of strategy I didn't really get from most of the other combat. I think fewer, more interesting battles would have been preferred overall. On the plus side, the best fight in the game was the last one, so that ended on a higher note.

The sprite work in the end scene was fantastic.

I can't say the humor did much for me, like some things were amusing but I have a feeling I missed a lot of references and some of the stuff was just weird. Speaking of references, the skill names were a nice touch and many of them seemed on point in terms of what they did.

The best part to me was the story, and largely in the sense that it's an adventure of self-discovery. I liked Harold's personality and dialogue much moreso than Marsha or Alex's as hinted at above, but even with that I think the writing was generally solid for what you were trying to do. I guess I have a slight hang-up about whether or not the entire sequence was just imaginary or real and in the latter case whether Alex used some reality bending powers to wrangle someone into an adventure without their consent. Apart from that, I think it's a clever way to set up Harold's character arc, and I think will resonate with a lot of audiences that have potentially been forced to face uncomfortable questions about self-identity.

I really liked the ideas but can only score based off of the (unfinished) state of the project.

I'd like to see this fully realized at some point!

Hey Loch!

Thanks a ton for playing and for your feedback. I'm very open to tweaking the UI and terminology for a potential full-size project and will keep your suggestions in mind.

Great to know someone is using the Vampire's Claw! One of the things I wanted to evaluate from this prototype is whether the advanced weapon skills with "bonus" abilities would be considered viable by players, despite the higher EP cost, and I am seeing that the answer is generally yes, which is awesome :)

Oath Games knocked the sprite work out of the park. (And did some great mapping and other design stuff, too!)

I really appreciate you sticking with it despite the play time going over. Thanks again!

--mooglerampage

Right a potential permanent lock was one thing I was afraid of as I ran out of Fire sources at one point.

Overall the writing was stronger than the marks I have for story, in other words the dialog and humor were pretty strong.

Thanks Nowis!

The skill learning menu being jam packed with unlearnable stuff would be my top priority to fix in a full-length game, followed closely by the issues with the Wait command as I had designed it poorly.

I'm glad the battle system itself seemed OK and I appreciate you sticking through what ended up being an unintentionally lengthy entry due to the battles.

Oath Games did an excellent job on the new tilesets and map sprites! (I can't take credit for anything other than the 2k3 styled areas)

Hot jams, good sprite work, an interesting puzzle/battle mechanic, and a silly story with lots of gags - pretty well-rounded and solid entry, here. I think the story was the weakest link but it was by no means bad, though I thought the motivations of the bad guys felt tonally a bit off versus the cute aesthetic and otherwise goofy vibe. In a longer entry I would've liked to see that explored more, but it was fine.

I wasn't keen on the statue fights locking out forage because if your item management & RNG didn't cooperate you could just waste a few turns. Otherwise the battles felt intuitive and had a nice variety of patterns. I personally did not see any bugs but was grateful for the frequent save prompts regardless.

Ronald, thanks so much for playing! I will definitely address the issue with the format of skill costs if this system is adopted for a future project. 

Glad you enjoyed the game.

Yeah man this is definitely top 3 for comedy, graphics, and music, and if the "story" category was instead a more general "writing" criteria it would be a contender as well.

As you said the other stuff is fixable. In a hypothetical scenario where this gets an update post jam, I would give it another go.

The humor is 11/10. Unfortunately, I can only judge much of the content loosely based on watching Padr's playthrough (which was a lot of fun to watch to be fair) as I was just not able to deal with the input system in any capacity.

You're supposed to match the rhythm of the inputs but the "check" for holding the input occurs so late that it's sometimes not always even possible to switch direction buttons quickly enough to meet the next check unless you're on a keyboard. I'm aware of the exploit to just hold multiple directions but I don't really like playing games to not engage with their systems, if that makes sense. (I also prefer to use a controller when supported)

And the lack of warning before the enemy timer makes it nearly impossible to parse their patterns before it checks for the first input and fails you. You might be able to fake it by holding down a random direction when they queue an attack, which fortunately the enemies seem to go second most of the time, but all told I would've just rather had a MGS parody flavored DQ clone. EDIT: one alternative suggestion for making the "CQC" less punishing would be to make it more like the Mario RPG / Mario and Luigi series where you get a bonus for landing the input, but the skill does something if you miss.

Art, music, vibe, and writing, all very good.

Full disclosure, I did test this game before the ratings period started so I will skip some of the stuff I'd already shared with the developer.

Pretty solid effort, some good ideas for character abilities just a bit held back by iffy encounter design and some balance issues. Still, there was a good variety of stuff to do and the classes felt very distinct from one another.

I think the thing that needs the most work is the writing, it wasn't bad per se but some sentences were clunky, felt overly expository, and/or weren't concise enough.

Visuals were strong overall and I didn't mind the music, though it did seem a bit out of place so I didn't give extra points for it despite being a metal guy myself.

Good game!

I am a bit saddened by lack of controller support and it was difficult for me to control at times, but ultimately I sunk a few tries into the last boss and was able to prevail.

Maybe I missed the instructional text to tap right click to just throw a regular projectile but I didn't discover it until the cave area. Spark itself was great, had a nice risk/reward factor and you could bait a TON of enemies into it. It also did so much damage that I ended up kind of tanking the last boss via potions / attrition, after my dodging skills proved too feeble. Adding i-frames to the casting animation was an awesome touch which I abused a lot.

The boss' attack scripts felt like sometimes he would sit there and let you wail on him for a while, other times he was playing 4d chess and the player was a checkers piece. But that sharp uptick in challenge is my biggest gripe besides the control scheme.

Wonderful graphics and music to round out a very above average effort.

Overall, pretty solid!

Could have almost left out the interactive battles and made them into cinematics, since there wasn't a lot of mechanical depth, but it was at least very interesting and the presentation was great.

I discovered some sort of cheat/test room behind the king where all the collisions were broken. I thought I'd found a secret at first haha.

Other than one small-ish punctuation error and a couple text boxes that ran out of room, the writing and polish were on the stronger side.

Very unique idea! Feels like a scavenger hunt kind of thing.

I want to rate this higher because of the novelty and cleverness despite it not fitting very well into the ratings categories we have for this jam.

Hey Nate, thanks for playing and for the great feedback! Sorry a lot of the design elements were unclear and stress inducing.

Regarding the story, unfortunately it's all at the beginning and end. You can probably figure out the point in the development cycle where we realized that A) there wasn't time for more character scenes and B) the game was already too long for more of them anyways.

Tutorials were absolutely a weakness of the game as I had to assemble them hastily on the last day along with the entire endgame, basically.

I should've left Autosave on in hindsight. I though "save everywhere" was good enough, but that was probably a poor assumption to make.

Skill masteries are very subtle and only add a few extra points of damage to lower-tier skills. The effect is more pronounced on State-granting skills (or should be anyways) as well as the higher EP skills. Might have been too subtle especially in the jam format where you almost never get past skill level 3. Lessons learned.

I'm glad the consensus is that this system would be better for a long-form game since as you have discovered by now, evaluating that option was the point of making this prototype.

Much appreciated input as always.

--moogle

Thanks a lot for playing and for your detailed thoughts on the experience!

There has been some discussion on these points on other forums (Discord etc.) so most of what I'll say here is for the sake of other players / prospective players.

Just to save folks some suspense, this system was designed as a prototype for a full-length game I was (and still am) considering, which as was pointed out would need to be after Moonfell. Assuming the system gets traction enough to move forward with, I still have no clue when such a project may occur, but it's an exciting prospect for down the road. Maybe.

Because of the above, I kind of had to push the content to the max as a litmus test to see if it would even gel. Wasn't the most prudent decision to start with a sort of mechanical architecture and build the game around it, but it's what I was able to come up with in the limited time I had. I should have predicted, but didn't, that ETB (energy turn battle, the sort of Hearthstone-esque turn system where each side gets an increasing number of actions every round) would significantly increase battle duration by at least 2x what I had allotted for. That combined with almost tapping out of the jam a few times due to IRL conflicts (and losing some dev time accordingly) led to a very awkward moment less than 48 hours before submissions closed where Oath Games had to talk some sense into me in order to get the project delivered at all, much less in decent shape.

The final boss is definitely too hard and demands either being over-leveled, over-geared, or bringing in some fairly specialized tech in order to compensate for his attacks being over-tuned. My apologies to anyone that faces that fight blind, and nobody will judge you for turning the difficulty down to Easy for one fight (the NPC to talk to is in the main hub, the guy on the right).

So, yeah a bunch of small misfires, though for the record, I didn't really read your comments as overall negative but there were some valid issues as well as some more subjective things that I broadly agree with! On the other hand, I'm glad the general consensus (so far) is that the system itself is fun / worthwhile despite the hangups.

Anyways I appreciate your feedback as well as sticking through the game until the end!

Thanks so much for playing Starmage! Also I appreciate you letting me borrow Klein for this entry.

If you don't mind an additonal question or two: Do you think a longer form game with this battle and skill system would be interesting? Were there any specific elements that felt confusing or imbalanced?

I had intended to put some "survey" questions onto the game page but ran out of time haha :)

I have a potentially dumb idea that I'll toss out there anyway, because it would partially address my biggest criticism and completely address one of my other complaints: perhaps you can ask the player to select some kind of background/profession in a sort of "character generation" menu, prior to being whisked away from their old life.

This would grant them an ability matching that background, which they could immediately use in the tutorial battle. Since they are some kind of chosen one anyways, it wouldn't create any sort of narrative dissonance in my opinion. They're just... a natural leader.

I don't know if this suits other story elements that are already in place, so feel free to discard this if it doesn't.

Thanks again and good luck with your project! I plan to check back in with it once things are a bit less busy on my end.

I'm not sold on the narrative choice to make the protagonist's past life uninteresting. Between that and the abruptness of being pulled away it feels kind of rushed versus the rest of the intro.

I wish the "enter name" boxes would have more obvious prompts than just the input cursor, and not allow the player to accidentally skip them. I don't know if the engine supports checking for an empty text string before progressing to the next event, or perhaps just a confirmation prompt of the entered name would work. I decided to roll with the main character being a nameless entity from another realm or something, but if I feel like most players would just restart the game at that point (hence, it's an unnecessary point of friction).

First battle, I got down to 1 HP after selecting an Air Knight, a Fire Rogue, and the Water Mage. I was decently sure my party comp should have been favorable against the enemy group, but the intro text only provides a very vague idea as to what beats what, rather than specifics. So maybe my comp was bad - or maybe it was good, and my RNG was unfavorable - I honestly have no clue. And that's a pretty big problem. The first fight was, other than making some profoundly uninformed decisions, completely non-interactive. I felt like I should have lost but barely pulled out a victory due to a lucky roll about 14 skirmishes in. But more importantly I felt like the victory, as well as the defeat which probably should have taken place instead, were entirely un-earned.

Despite the lack of mechanical satisfaction, there was some tension and excitement and the battle music did its job. I'm just already pretty skeptical of the core mechanics, or at least how the player is onboarded to them.

I'm digging the exploration system so far.

I tried reading the Basics and Tactics pages for info I missed, and honestly it's overwhelming. I feel like there's got to be a better way of guiding the player through this information.

Second random encounter, I completely murdered them. But my elemental bonus was a net negative per the info at the top of the combat screen! Hypothesis: the game system favors offense (larger dice over larger HP pools), making Knights bad. I will test this further as I go.

The self-deprecating nature of the companion(s) is kind of grating but I wonder if it's meant to be, as a way of highlighting the political / societal issues in play. I can see there's been a lot of effort that's gone into world building, although having that come in via a slow trickle of incidental dialog is interesting in contrast to just kind of being dumped into combat.

Battle 3, seemed very easy once again despite having a negative elemental modifier. I'm back to thinking it's more RNG than anything, with the Morale skill being basically essential to player survivability. That creates another issue, since there's no reason (yet) NOT to spam Morale every turn it's available. Battle 4 was the same findings.

I had a massive element and faction bonus going into the boss battle, and used Morale every turn. Seemed like the boss would spam its special at every opportunity as well, dealing 1/2 of the incoming damage back to my party. Which was nearly the only threat it posed, but that threat alone was enough to get me down to 1 HP at the end of the battle.

Got to the first major story milestone and am calling it good here.

Conclusion

The art is fantastic and the animations add a lot to a format I am usually skeptical towards (visual novels). Dialog is generally solid, and while there's more world building than storytelling so far, it's competently done, and I am admittedly quite early in so I assume it will get more engaging once we meet this important NPC they keep talking about. I am genuinely interested to see how the plot begins to unfold. The Renpy GUI is fine enough, but it sometimes feels janky where menus are concerned. Small voice over snippets don't do much for me, but the rest of the sound design is very solid.

Sadly, I don't see this maintaining my interest mechanically. It's just too random and at the same time too repetitive to hold up any longer than the five or six battles it took me to escape the newbie area. I feel like combat needs a complete re-work, but if that's infeasible at this stage I could see a larger early game skill variety (and in general, more actual gameplay E.G. interactivity) going a long ways as well.

I hope these notes are useful and wish you continued success on your project. My tastes aside, it's very well done!

Super fun playthrough, I appreciate it!

I like the ideas you had about changing up the music a bit more during cutscenes, and adding more background info about the kingdom during the prologue. Regarding the former, I'll need to source some additional tunes, but that's already something I'm working on for new content, so it shouldn't be too tricky; for the latter, I think just changing up the generic "you can't use this" flavor text should suffice - I don't want to give too much away after all, since later chapters do revisit the royals' history.

Hoping you're down to play Chapter 2 (and beyond) when they're ready!

Thanks for playing, Bakar! I appreciate you taking the time to check out my project.

I like that approach. Hopefully none of the effects are too complex (from what I've seen so far should be OK)

Thanks for playing ColoCoko! I appreciate your comments.

Hey Cootadude, thanks for the detailed reply.

Seems like we're mostly on the same wavelength as far as the approach needed to get the game in line with your vision. The good news is, you have sort of a design roadmap available based on what worked in this version and what didn't, should you choose to restart from scratch.

I think the RNG thing is just part of the genre but I'll certainly pop back in if I think of anything later on.

BTW did you decide on a title, from what I am seeing?

This game has improved massively since last time I played. Well done on all the new features and content as well as the QoL stuff I am seeing in this build.

It might be just a little bit addicting (I saw after playing for almost 2 hours and missing my bedtime).

I think it's still sometimes hard to tell what a skill will actually do, but that's a function of having so many effects and skills with proc chances and whatnot. I don't even know how to suggest improving that at this point.

Other than info overload and some occasionally unforgiving RNG, I didn't find any friction points that significantly reduced my enjoyment of the game.

Hi! My apologies in advance for the novel to follow. I wanted to provide as much detail as possible regarding my experience in the hopes of providing actionable feedback. I'm hoping it comes across as such, rather than an attempt to roast the game.

I'd like to see the intro display something other than a black screen with the dialog boxes. Seems like a lost opportunity.

Is there any way to convey the characters' classes/roles other than that kind of chunky tutorial text? Something that also demonstrates their personalities might be better. (EDIT: I don't have any sense of what makes these characters tick, even as far as the maze section)

"This should be easy". Enemy proceeds to deal 2/3 of Eliza's HP in damage in one turn. If the third attack had gone her direction I would have lost a character instantly, which seems weird for an opening battle. I didn't use Taunt because the characters said it would be easy, and the hint text said that skill was for harder battles, so it kind of felt like a gotcha to be honest.  Maybe you have something in place to where Eliza can't die in the fight and it's just cinematic, but it doesn't establish a great feel right off the bat.

The tutorial text assumes keyboard rather than controller. Would be an easy fix to just mention which buttons are mapped on your average X Box or generic gamepad. Though, I think it would be better still to use a key rebind plugin and direct the player there to configure their own control scheme.

The second wave of guards doesn't have that crazy triple attack skill, or maybe it was just bad RNG on the intro battle. I'd still suggest making the intro fight not have a chance to kill Eliza out of nowhere, if it doesn't already.

I don't like stuff with such a low % chance of working, but it's OK-ish for damage skills which just happen to have secondary effects. Cure, on the other hand, should never have a % chance to work. That feels extremely bad, and I would never waste 10 MP and potentially a turn on that. (EDIT: I never really found a need to remove States, which isn't a sign that they are well designed)

NOTE: can you put in the skill descriptions which ones are instant-cast? It feels like Heal and Taunt don't take an action, but I have no way to confirm that's actually how it works other than observation.

Curiosity: why does magic do fixed damage, but physical scales with ATK? Fire and Light are already super weak versus literally anything Ryoma can do, since he now has THREE skills which deal multiple hits, each of which deals in excess of 100 damage. BTW, he learned Dual Attack at level 4, but he already had the skill at level 1. Was he not supposed to have this starting off?

These battles pose literally no threat now since I level up every time and the DEF scaling seems to make enemy attacks do negligible damage.

Got Fire 2 already.  The % chance is high enough to maybe proc sometimes, great. Its damage is already lower than Ryoma's Dual Attack, though, and I just learned it. Plus Fire1 is completely useless, since I don't have to worry about MP conservation given how this leveling system works. Incidentally,  I don't level up every encounter now (which is good), but there isn't a sense of danger or attrition to any of the battles. I also get one or more potions from every fight.

Enemy detection is kind of wonky. Sometimes they make an alert emote but don't approach or speed up.

I found a Buckler, cool. Wait why does it REDUCE my Guard Effect from 100% to 5%?! I think it was supposed to increase it to 105%, perhaps? Well, Imma equip it anyways because the DEF bonus warrants it.

Please consider using a plugin that makes it so moving events stop moving when an event / dialog box is playing. I just got stopped by a random "I think this is where the secret passage is" text box, which felt weird because he just said he didn't know where the passage was 30 seconds ago, then 3 guards mobbed me. Very tedious, because at this point enemies are just bags of hit points and treasure.

The Eliza solo fight was the closest thing to a strategic battle I've had this far. Felt pretty good to exploit the slime's weakness right away, but the rest of the battle was sketchy because it felt like if both soldiers used their OP skills on the same turn I would just be dead. So, used Sweep to stun one guy, used Heal every turn to top off, and used Dual Attack to chop down the enemies. At this point it dawned on me that TP recovers so quickly from damage taken that I have practically unlimited. I'd strongly suggest reducing the TP gain rate.

Ran into the secret passage (the black screen eventing once again felt lazy tbh) and then wandered around the maze for a bit looking for levers. Nothing new or exciting at this point, and unfortunately I am not invested at all in the story because it's so generic and there are no character moments. Actually, at this point it's barely a story, it's a series of plot events. And the gameplay is not compelling either.

I don't want to harp on the mapping too much because it looks like a previous reviewer covered that, but I will concur that it needs a lot of work. Not just mapping however; the level design itself is subpar. I think you could do more interesting things with having to be stealthy and not just farm all the battles in these huge rooms, though that would require fixing whatever mechanism is driving the enemy alerts.

I know this is a big update to an existing game and it seems like a lot of effort has been spent in establishing scope and setting up later characters and story arcs, but with an introduction this clunky I feel like a lot of players will tap out before you get there. My advice would be to refocus that effort into quality rather than scale. If the game was polished I could somewhat forgive a lot of the less-than-original mechanics and tropes and the vanilla gameplay, but the combination of poor balancing, obvious database mistakes, and generally questionable systems design make it very tough to trudge through.

I hope this info is useful and that you find success in continuing to improve your project.