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SkyFortress Prologue's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Completeness | #79 | 2.449 | 3.000 |
Scope | #91 | 2.041 | 2.500 |
Fun | #101 | 1.633 | 2.000 |
Innovation | #104 | 1.633 | 2.000 |
Aesthetics | #106 | 2.041 | 2.500 |
Roguelikeness | #111 | 2.041 | 2.500 |
Overall | #116 | 1.973 | 2.417 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
This looks like a lot of stock RPG Maker stuff with a dungeon generator, so I'm being less forgiving with aesthetics and scope than I would normally be.
I found the gameplay frustrating. The first thing you're supposed to do is allocate a bunch of stat points, but the stats aren't explained. The game seems to assume you know the mechanics already. The monster variety is low, but there are a lot of them wandering around. Battles take a long time. I found myself only getting into fights when I absolutely needed to not because I was making a risk/reward tradeoff, but because they felt very repetitive.
There's lots to go over when jumping into a project based on a lot of prior existing content, and I can't really tell what is new or not here since that's not clarified on the itch.io page. At least it's relatively easy to get into since it's standard JRPG fare. Of course, the main problem with such a large body of content is that it can be challenging to balance in order for it to be more enjoyable, and the balance here is all over the place. Enemies I could barely hurt could also barely hurt me, resulting in long and boring encounters. The lack of balance basically meant that I could just hold Enter through an entire fight. Now I assume enemies would've died faster were I not fighting them mostly bare-handed, but despite the characters saying they should spend their starting gold, I could find no way to actually do this. I looked through all the menu options but didn't see a way to do it, and I also tried researching it on the net, but couldn't figure it out. I then left my browser (latest Firefox) for a bit and came back and when I tried to continue a battle all my progress was lost and it automatically started over. I'd love to try more if I could find how to buy things, and also if I didn't have to spend so long allocating so many stat points for multiple characters at the start of every run.
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Comments
Any chance you could suggest a build and give a basic strategy guide? I'm not a JRPG fan at all and I have no idea what I'm doing.
It is crazy how much content and how many assets there are for this. I can only imagine from the description that most of this is taken from the larger project mentioned. It was fun to see a fully realized JRPG system in browser, but I didn't get too much into the gameplay.
One thing that might be worth considering, if this is the proof of concept for a larger game, is what is gained by having the visually wandering monsters, rather than the random invisible encounters. I found my self having little dancing and dodging contests to avoid the enemies, which doesn't feel like the kind of behavior you want to reward in a game like this. But who knows!