Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics are a mix of different resources and RTP. Some of them stand out a bit, others work well enough. The mapping is large and basically empty. Decorations beyond just throwing some big trees around would have helped a lot. Some grass, flowers, scaling the maps down... all things that could have helped to make the outside areas less of a bland existence.

  There was an overlay. It didn't help.

  Sound was okay - nothing really helping with atmosphere but nothing jarring either. There was however voice acting which was a mixed bag. Some characters sounded better than others, and some of the VA was a bit softer than the rest too.

  Music was decent. The battle theme was nice but the rest didn't stand out in either good or bad ways. It was just there.

  Writing was decent. There weren't any errors that I can recall. The characterisation was a bit on the bland side bar one character who was incredibly obnoxious... and not in the likeable way. The story itself was a mess and the hour was up before I figured out what was going on. It really wasn't clearly presented, but that might be due to the pacing and padding making it hard to actually get to the meat of the story.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consisted of battles and interaction.
  You walk around large maps grabbing chests that are just laying around for no reason, then interact with characters who say something inane before heading to bed in order to skip time until the story segments occur.

  There were some additional options like a wardrobe that changed your appearance and giving some exp by reading a book.

  Battles consisted of inputting arrow key combinations to deal larger damage when attacking, skills that required either button mashing or more combination inputs to use and dying.

  The game was just badly balanced. Enemies hit very hard but you had no healing items that you could use in battle - in fact it was very easy to screw yourself over for the first boss due to not being able to find any healing items for health OR enough money to buy any (yes, there's a small pouch of Silva in the tree but the tree was broken so you couldn't get it). This meant that if you had the bad luck of looking around before finding the boss and getting into an encounter you'd be entering the boss with missing health that a skill you can miss would help alleviate only a small amount.

  And skills cost so much MP that you'd get maybe two off before having to restore MP a bit. By then your health would be almost gone and the enemy is just as fast as you. It took me 5 times to defeat that boss - the first three times I was missing health from having fought another monster beforehand, the two last times I'd had to reload from a previous save about 10 minutes earlier just to make sure I didn't go into the battle missing any health, and even then it took another game over before I finally got it.

  Then the next area has that boss as a normal enemy... when you don't have another character to help you out. You had to grind and grind around the healing point that was provided in order to slowly eke out more levels so you could survive.

  Black screen bug when climbing into the hole to get the money pouch.

  ENGAGEMENT
  Grinding isn't fun when the junk mobs you're supposed to be grinding against can kill you in a few turns and you don't have health healing items to alleviate that. Oh, and when MP is thin on the ground (I had to reload again, to a time before I spent my money on armour, just to get a bracelet that took all my money just to have an extra 200MP to work with... and no armour.)

  This game had promise when it came to the story, but it had so much padding in the way of long battles that were annoying and large maps that you had to run through. Oh, and the walk speed in houses is beyond stupid. If I didn't have autorun on then I would have been moving at a literal crawl. Don't ever do that. I wanted to die every time I had to suffer through walking inside a house.

  THEME
  The theme was I have no idea. I didn't get far enough into the story to figure that out due to the padding. I guess maybe it was something like don't judge a book by it's cover? That's the closest I can come up with that sounds about right. Maybe. It just didn't convey any real theme to the player in the hour that I played.

  26/80