Hey there Rivios Games , I got your game for judging so here are some of my thoughts. The cinematic opening told me this was going to be a game with a big story. You clearly put effort into the mapping, but there were some oddities in passability that I put down to running out of time.  I liked the idea of QTEs in battle, but there was no tutorial so I wasn't sure when I was supposed to hit 'ok'. The screen effects you used were cool to look at at first, but I want to caution you that having a static effect the whole way through a battle could cause your player eye strain and headaches so you may want to tone it down a bit. I also ran into a loading error when exploring the items menu, it seemed like a ring image was missing.

Like others, I got stuck when trying to exit the town building through the southern doorways. I was a fool and hadn't saved after the snowy fight, so I ended up spending a lot of time redoing the battle and rewatching the cutscenes. Instead of trying to explore that second time I went straight to the meeting place, though since the woman wasn't there I had to go explore anyways. I'm sure there are story reasons for it, but I wish we could've had the important conversation right away since it felt like I spent a lot of the game just wandering around.

Overall, it seems like you have the start of an epic game here, but it suffered from the contest deadline. Hopefully you continue this project, good luck!

Wow! What a captivating opening cinematic! There's so much love and attention to detail that has gone into this game -- from the shaking ship, the footprints in the snow, and the NPCs actually missing after they're killed -- and I think the idea of gaining experience for exploration is really interesting!

Once the crash happens, I found it funny that the guards didn't join the battles out in the snow. Why are they there, if not to help fight (it makes sense with who I am assuming is Septitus, since he takes them out first)? The fight with Septitus is great; I was pretty sure it was a fight we were meant to lose, but even with that expectation, it still felt almost balanced and like I could win, with the items I had. I also liked the eerie music used for the fight. It tied into all the other Final Fantasy-esque references. 

There are some rough mapping (walls with no ceilings, walking on the bed), collisions, and eventing (after the "dream" you see the character first in front of their journal and then pop over to stand on the bed, and the movement speed is SLOWWWW after that initial fight. I think it was changed for the cutscene and never changed back, maybe?)... And then unfortunately, after talking to Estevaila, I went exploring, as she suggested, and got stuck here, unable to move or open the menu or do anything:

Estevaila saying "to the right of us" makes sense to a player, but there are walls to both of their rights, which are different, since they're facing each other. Maybe have her say "over that way" or something would be better, since we see her walk off screen, too.

Overall, I think you have a great start here and hope you'll keep working on the game post IGMC!

I was onboard with the game until it hit the first town, where the pace slowed down considerably, worse, I got stuck and unable to progress: after the cutscene where I talk to the lady and she tells me to meet again, I left the building and I could not come back in or leave nor do anything else.

Overall I felt like this had some merits, especially the care to detail in some areas, but it definitely had some letdowns.

• The title screen, while cool in concept, lagged horribly.
• The video at the intro was nice, if it was made custom, that's impressive.
• Getting experience from exploring is a neat concept. personally I think the exp was on the high side, and every single interaction including chests felt a bit overkill. I think getting exp from the more "important" bits (backstory, lore, etc) would be better, but that's just me.
• The dialog pace (not the text, the actual display) felt slow and clunky, the lack of a skip feature really made accidentally talking to npcs twice a chore. I'd suggest giving the option of having instant or fast text.
• On the dialog again: if you're going to make use out of waits in the text bubble or a lot of long names, I'd suggest using a regular textbox: dialog bubbles work best when kept trimmed and snappy.
• The mapping is fairly rough, which felt strange because other areas of the presentation felt like they had some amount of care in them. It was tolerable, but definitely noticeable.
• The little details of footsteps sounds and footprints were a nice touch.
• The sprites/combat battlers did not really match the faceset in the menu, which makes me wonder if this was custom art or an assembly of assets: either way, the menu faces were a bit of an odd choice to me.
• The combat assets and elements felt weirdly small and lost in the big resolution screen, especially the hud with actor hp/mp/tp.
• While I enjoyed having "active" aspects to the skills and attacks, it would have been best explained,  as the game never told me what was the corrector "action" to take was, should I press the Blade bar as soon or as late as possible? No idea. 
• The lack of things to do in combat, at least in the first area, aside of the "big boom" and "attack" was a bit boring, especially in the longer fight against the dark figure.