Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags

Ninja Reaper

1
Posts
2
Followers
A member registered Jul 04, 2020 · View creator page →

Creator of

Recent community posts

You guys have done some excellent work. For being given two weeks to make a project, this is legitimately well done. 

However, I have been asked to review this, and review it I shall!

Story

Pros: I really like the storyline you guys have going here. It kind of brings light to what happened with Sumireko, and I kind of hope I get to see her in here somewhere. The plot is engaging, and I can definitely see it going somewhere. The characters are well-written and their personalities bounce well off of each other.

Cons: I remember seeing this in a comment on the submission page, and I have to agree to a certain extent. The pacing is a bit off, I think specifically during the university section. For a game made in two-weeks, I think this amount of heavy-handedness is fine to get the point across, but for the full game, I would love to see this angle elongated and more subtle.

Music

Pros: I'm not gonna lie, I might be a bit biased here since I know the musician, but my god, the music is good. It fits the atmosphere perfectly and sets the tone for each scene. It doesn't completely overwhelm you or get annoying, but it does stand out enough to make an impact, and I like it.

Cons (I'll let you decide if these are truly cons or not): I would love to see MORE music, possibly a victory theme or other little themes (this is more for the full game, as I understand you are a limited team on a time crunch). The other nitpick is that the music almost sounds TOO grand for certain moments. It's almost as if it feels like there should be higher stakes here, but instead you're fighting Mystia.

Art:

Pros: I mean, it looks like a Touhou game, and Touhou games look great so...

Ok, in all seriousness, it looks great. The 8-bit overworld sprites look like they were ripped right out of the design style of Final Fantasy, and the battle sprites excellently convey each person's personality. Not only that, each persons character portrait looks like it was ripped right out of a Touhou game and digitized to fit in an 8-bit JRPG. Well done.

Cons: It's kind of the same thing with the music where I would love to see more. For a time crunch, what you have here is good. For the full game though, having the main character's portrait constantly appearing as though she has better things to do may disconnect the player from certain situations.

Gameplay

I saved this for last because I want to mention that I won't be mentioning any bugs here. Not just because of the time crunch, but also because I was a dumbo and didn't download the game. As such, your experience may change sightly.

That said...

Pros: The battle system is very unique. I love the fact that the game encourages you to vary your attacks in order to charge up one attack or another. With more time put into this system, I believe that it will become that much better and stand up that much more. I mean, I can't normally get into JRPGs, but unique battle systems like this one really help keep me engaged through each battle. For what I can say about glitches, I was expecting more, but other than a few hitches, the game worked perfectly fine. You guys might want to fix that stair thing though. Fortunately, I saw the comment first rather than running into the bug myself...

Cons: While the battle system was excellent, the overworld on the other hand feels a bit lackluster. What I would love to see in the future is the game rewarding you more for looking around. A hidden pathway that leads to a good item perhaps, or just something that makes me want to explore the areas more. However, this also ties in with another thing I would like to see, which is more dialogue. While the game already has a fair amount of dialogue that gets presented to the player (a bit too much at times), what would help with these sort of expositional chunks would be to break them up and give them to items around the world. Allow the player a view into the characters thoughts and emotions as they interact with the world around them. This will make them want to explore more, and combined with the secrets, would really help to alleviate the sort of bland feeling of the overworld sections and could help ease the burden of the exposition chunks.

Conclusion

All and all, what you all have here is a fine specimen that just needs a bit of tweaking. There is a good foundation for a great game here, and it just needs a little bit more polish in a few areas in order to truly make this diamond shine.

Congratulations on your achievements, and I can't wait to see how this game looks in the future!