itch.io

I finally finished the demo! It's much bigger than I expected, but I got sad once I realized I can't visit a lot of of the map. I did found a lot of bugs though and I think the game has some questionable design choices.

A lot of the towns have empty pots or drawers. I don't think its that bad but at some point I just gave up looking at them, I'm not sure but theres entire towns where there's really nothing on the pots or drawers. I also found a lot of the doors to be unlockable. I thought this was normal, but then after defeating the gremlins they gave me a Theif's Key. I think this is more of a bug though. The dungeons are too large. Or perhaps the encounter rate is pretty small. It's not that bad but grinding is pretty hard when having to walk around 30 steps just to get an encounter. The hero also walks pretty slow, and you can only save at certain towns. This was offputting me at first, but this is pretty accurate for the nes style. Some npcs like the prisoners and Kandar don't have any dialouge. I think the encounter animation could be changed removed, and the encounter music is a bit off-putting. Especially at the start, the scrolling text theme could've just been continued until the scene moves at the castle.

Now for the bugs, when leveling up, there's this message coming up that the level up sound is missing. This means you have to save then reset and reload the game every time you level up. Paired with the fact you can only save at towns, this is pretty annoying at times, especially near the end or in the middle of dungeons. There are also instances where you can use the Return spell while riding the ship, thus causing the player to teleport to a town while inside the ship. Some npcs in Portchrall also talk about Maria being kidnapped. If you visit the port too early, they still have that dialouge despite Maria still being in town.

I did found some stuff that I really love. The dialouge is pretty well written, and some npcs are callbacks to previous npcs in previous dragon quest entries. I also found the puff puff scene to be quite hilarious, I didn't expect that. There's also the npc that curses you, I thought it was serious but i just laughed at her, then the curse sound came on and i was shocked. I didn't affect my character in anyway as far as I know. The mapping in the game is also quite good, despite having limited tiles I really like it. The encounters are very good too, they're random enough so they don't get boring. A downside to this is you can easily never encounter a lot of monsters on your first walk in that area. This is a pretty great game, aside from the leveling sound problem, this is a pretty enjoyable experience to play through. If I may ask, is the game going to be finished?

I loved this game and it has inspired me! How did you achieve the crt look though and what font did you use? It looks so good!

I love this retro style puzzle game, reminds me of atari

I love this game. I feel nostalgic ngl. I love the music too. This is so awesome, I could really feel the effort used to made this. I love the enemy sprites too, so if it's okay with you I'm going to borrow them. Anyways great game.

cool

This is just what I needed for my game as I already have Mighty Palm's the Mighty Pack, so I just need music. Thank you so much now I can make my free game.