Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 6! My name's Hythrain, and I'm one of the hosts and streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live on my stream.

I'm a lover of turn based RPGs, even when they feel so generically RPG Maker. So I had fun playing this. However, I also felt like because it's RPG Maker, I should let myself get more specific with things. You also plan on "remaking" this, so I'm more invested in helping you make it better it all regards. Some of this may seem as nitpicking, but I promise it helps to fix things up.

First, I want to know what you're doing to differentiate yourself from other RPG Maker games in terms of gameplay. A prime example of what I mean is in this event: Moonfell. It uses its own distinct art style and makes a UI that doesn't feel like RPG Maker, though you can tell it has RPG Maker roots when you look very closely. It does its own thing to stand out as unique. Its developer also has another RPG Maker game that ALSO feels unique and not at all like RPG Maker. So what are you doing to be unique? If nothing, you need to think in terms of gameplay as well as story for your remake.

Here are a few things I noticed during my playthrough that should also be avoided or addressed in a remake that (I hope) aren't repeats of Moogle's.

1. Eliza gets her next turn much faster when using attack at level one, to the point where she's better off not using magic at all for the first few levels. If someone is intended as a mage, they should benefit by acting as a mage.

2. There are a lot of sounds going on in the first area, with fire burning and sword clashing on top of the music. I would absolutely say you should remove at least one, if not both of those additional sounds as they're just not necessary. If you do add it, make sure it's not too loud either. ideally, you should be able to hear music first and then the sound effects for those consistent ones. If it's one time and short, then it can be louder.

3. One of the first chest items you can get is a Small Sword. It's weaker than the starting weapon for all characters. Just... why? Chests should always be upgrades, unless you've been able to buy better. Speaking of, limit what the first stores can sell instead of giving them everything. This will make more sense later.

4. I was confused when I got my first random battle, since it seemed to be a set battle game. Outside of the world map, it didn't make sense to me to do both outside of boss fights. I'd say you should remove the random battles from in-area places, keeping instead only set battles. You could do random battles on the world map if you really want to, but if you don't then you can more easily control experience gain and thus always have an idea what level the player should be at. This lets you plan boss encounters around whatever skills the characters will have at minimum by then.

5. So while I love when something is more clearly told in the environment, the massive swing between finding the secret staircase and being told the exact ways to go in the maze to save you time just felt widely different. You need to find a balance in this. On one hand, you want something to stand out enough for the player to know it's what they're looking for, which nothing really did for the stairs. For a prime example, you can check LTTP just before the Agahnim. On the other hand, you don't need such an obvious tell as arrows that point the efficient way right when you need them. Instead, what you could do is something more subtle like showing a certain number of tiles in a way that indicates if it's first or second. If this doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll happily make an example image.

6. So when I was trying to buy items from the shops after getting out of the cave (which was also the first time I had bought anything), there were a LOT of different items. There were two swords that had no description to them, but based on power and money scaling they looked to only be upgrades of the previous swords. However, it turned out they were 2H swords. This leads me to a bigger issue of every character being able to equip a lot of similar gear with no uniqueness to them. Not only does this make decisions less meaningful, but it means when you offer a TON of gear options it gets very confusing. Think of it like this: you don't need to have weaker versions of weapons if the player is likely just going to go for the strongest thing. Similarly, when you limit gear you only need to put up what should be the minimum gear baseline for the next area. That way, items moving forward also remain upgrades that may or may not be beaten by items the next time you get the chance to upgrade. This is why I suggested limiting what the first stores can sell.

So those were the things that felt important to address. These will make your area design and your gameplay just a bit more unique. Now this is only just for the gameplay. I also wanted to speak about story, as a hopeful writer myself and absolutely want to help.

At no point did any of the dialogue give any sense of character personality. Like, if you had told me the personalities and behaviours of each character, I would not be able to identify any of that in the dialogue. Every statement and question was very much next on the "let's keep pushing the story" side, which never allows for personality. I think the only thing that ever gave me that sense was when the Queen of Termerkia said their daughter should stay, since it'd be a learning experience. This one line gives a LOT of personality, but whether it's intended or not is another question. It makes her seem as a strict and pissed off type, who has a bit of cruelty to her. If that's your intent, cool. If not, welp, ya done goofed. Overall, because of this matter-of-fact style of talking, it also means the story gets rushed. There's no room for discussion or questioning of things that ultimately don't matter for the sake of the story but should be to be realistic like who the heck is Terence and why was he listening in and trusted so immediately?

As such, if you want me to I would be happy to help you flesh the story more into something far stronger. It'll still be you writing it, but I'll help you work in the personality more. This will make your story stick out more, as well.

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.

I also had to go to an earlier version. I went with 1.1 just to be safe.  Everything seemed to run fine on that version. One suggestion I'd make is that there was a lot of characters introduced in a short time, so I think having their names displayed when talking would be helpful for the player to remember. I very much appreciate that the story driving forwards and throws you right into things without unnecessary hand holding, but it's hard to feel sympathetic to the characters when they are constantly moving forward often a bit recklessly. Maybe some banter sprinkled in or other way to give the characters moments to speak that showcase their unique personalities?

Heyo! I just got done testing this, and here are my overall thoughts! I've also prepared a Google Doc for you to read my live playtesting notes!

Overall, I think this game needs to figure out what its priorities are. Is this supposed to be a character driven adventure? A political drama? Or is the story just set dressing for an interesting combat system? Currently it doesn’t do anything especially well, and I’m not sure what the game’s big push is, either for players or for the devs. For players, what reason do we have to play a game like this? And for a dev, what aspect of this game makes you dedicated to keep making it? If you can answer those questions, let them guide your decisions to make a more interesting product.

Overall Fun: 1 / 5 - Enormous maps with on-map encounters, a huge tedious maze dungeon, tank but unchallenging enemies, very basic combat, and a lack of intriguing story or characters prevents me from really finding anything fun here. It wasn’t the most painful to get further in, but it was entirely lacking in flavour.

Art/Graphics: 2 / 5 - Mostly inoffensive RTP assets which would get a 3 from me, but the poor mapping and perceived lack of effort in most areas docks a point for me.

UI/Controls: 2 / 5 - Very little effort went into the UI, with default RPG Maker window layouts and text, as well as having to scroll through many menu options as the windows aren’t optimized to accommodate how many options there are. The UI is very sloppy, and the default layouts make it come off as lazy and uninspired.

Sound/Music: 2 / 5 - Mostly, it’s just generic and boring, but a few RTP songs are especially loud and grating. The choice to pitch shift a couple default RPG Maker tracks on its own doesn’t do much to make the game’s auditory identity feel deliberate or meaningful. 

Sorry, I know this was a little harsh! I think if you can figure out a more clear direction for the game, you’ll have much more success! Good luck to you, and feel free to ask if you have any questions!