Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• I love games that pander to me, and hey, this has it right in the title!  Slyonics and Alrunia's the Last Panderling 2 explores a world where you've already seen the near-extinction of your entire race, been a hero, saved the day, and just need to tie up a few loose ends. 

  The Last Panderling 2 does a really spectacular job of feeling like a robust, well-polished vertical slice or intro demo of a very solid zelda-y action rpg. The team obviously used their time wisely, ending up with an impressive as heck submission that hits some sweet highs.

  Sword swipes and dodges are a nice baseline for combat and generally feel tight and responsive. They could maybe use a bit of tweaking with hitboxes, and I'd have loved to see a bit more variety in player ability (say Lenny using a ranged attack, some sort of differentiation there), but given the time span of this jam what's there is already quite solid.  Kudos for supporting two players well, and also having surprisingly decent AI control for the second party member.  Neither of those are simple features to implement, and I was repeatedly impressed with Lenny's AI behavior, so great work!

  The spritework is really, really excellent, and it brings the Last Panderling 2's inhabitants to life.  The mossy lion in particular is just great, as is its side quest that helps give a nice extra bit of depth to traversing the world. Portraits are fantastically rendered, even including subtle bits of animation to help sell the characters.  Though the tiles are mostly outside assets (which is totally fine in this jam), I think you did a fantastic job of tweaking them and their palettes to create pleasing areas. There's an excellent level of cohesiveness ya were able to attain, everything fitting within a beautiful aesthetic, which is not an easy thing to pull off at all.

  Last Panderling 2's music is phenomenal, super pleasant and listenable.  I found myself just letting the title screen play a few times, and honestly? That's stronger than a lotta retail games, its recurring leit motif that reappears through pinecone town and the final boss tracks is just so so good.  A+ job here, ya should be proud of your tracks!

  The narrative and character dialogue really nicely hits the theme of unnecessary sequel: this feels like a hero and world that has run their course, and they're surprised themselves things are continuing on at this point.  But I like that it doesn't beleagur that conceit and manages to have a fun narrative throughline with nods to the previous events.

  There's definitely a few small-but-pretty-annoying issues in the judging build.  The two that jumped out the most to me were enemy invincibility frames making it a bit unpleasant to repeatedly whack enemies, and a tight camera-follow rectangle which makes seeing what's ahead often pretty difficult.  This restrictive camera is also a bit unwieldy in 2p, often cutting off dodges which can be a pain.  But these minor grievances don't do much to detract from the overall experience.

  I think this concept could readily be expanded upon, since what's here is a really tempting slice of gameplay that naturally leads into a larger experience.  Heck, I'd love to see you straight up make an actual the Last Panderling 1, or maybe use this world and its characters for another storyline with tightened gameplay.  You've really nailed a compelling experience with a lot of possibility for expansion, so if ya have any desire for that I say go for it!