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Well, I’ve played this almost two hours and I’m only at the fourth battle. This is brutally tough, although there is definitely satisfaction when you do manage to win. While I like the idea of the battle system, I think at this point the odds are a little too stacked against the player. Maybe if the penalty for using the block-all attack wasn’t quite so steep. The story was intriguing and everything has a very nice cinematic feel to it but I think the learning curve is a little too steep.
Score: 49/80
Engine
RPGMaker MV
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Comments
Ah.. I like this a lot. The story looks interesting! The characters are so cute! Lovey-dovey? haha
However what made me love this was that you have to actually strategize a little in battles. The little hints the characters give before the battle are a nice touch too! :)
Atm I'm stuck in the battle against the guys inside our house but I'll keep trying!
Edit: Forget those guys!
Emma is the real boss! SO HARD!
And she has some poison attack?! >_<
I give up.. XD
This is one of my favourites so far. I don't typically enjoy turn based combat as it usually feels like a repetitive soup of boredom, but you've turned it into a very precise deal of strategy, I bow to you for that. I also love the characters. I can't think of anything that might need improving outside what has been already been said.
I'm glad you liked the combat! This was a nice message. Thank you for playing.
Was not able to get very far with this. I couldn't work out how to defeat Mitchell. Despite reclaiming her bag and healing items, the option to access them was not in the battle menu, so I had to give up after getting a game over 3 times.
I think you might have a save bug as well. I noticed that you'd accidentally left a save file in your game, but starting the game from new actually wipes this out. That also means it wiped out any saves I'd tried to make since I didn't want to keep talking to the npcs whilst trying to change my strategy and see if I could defeat Mitchell. (I grant you that I'm not a fan of turn based battles and so don't have much experience with them, but it seemed a little off.)
Unfortunately that's the only real feedback I can give since I couldn't get far enough to get any sort of impression from the story. It was nice that your npcs had personality. Wasn't overly fond of your title screen graphic or the use of the medieval tileset alongside the rtp though.
Sorry to hear about this! If you didn't have access to the healing skills I definitely wouldn't expect you to be able to get past Mitchell. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to replicate this issue after testing it on two different computers.
One potential issue I can think of is to make sure you've looked in the "Special" menu of the battle screen, that's where all of Caroline's actions are available. The "Items" menu as is intentionally left inaccessible.
As for the save file, it does look like an autosave from when I was testing was included in the download, thanks for bringing that to my attention (woops T_T). When you start a new game, the new autosaves will overwrite it, so that part is expected. It should be autosaving before the fight with Mitchell though, so there should always be a save to avoid talking to the npcs again if things are working as intended.
Thank you for the feedback though! It's always nice to have people try my games.
That was my bad! Sorry!! Since Caroline had no skills to start, and we picked up a salve from a bag I guess I ignored the obvious skill and assumed I'd have items now. Ah, I got myself all confused about the autosave too. It might be helpful to mention that somewhere, else when you first start and die I think it's easy to assume if you hadn't saved that all was lost. I really appreciate the autosave though! I'd be in trouble without it haha.
Armed with my new knowledge I tried to continue on, but really it wasn't much easier XD Your battle system is really intense. It's engaging since each turn needs to be planned out, however I felt like it was teeth grittingly hard. There wasn't a single battle I was able to get through first time, which is ok, but sometimes by the 8th time fighting the same person I was getting very frustrated. There's definitely people out there who are going to love this challenge amongst all the generic random encounter battle games you see for RPGM, but if you wanted to make your game accessible to more people who perhaps don't have the time or enjoy battles enough to keep trying, I'd suggest perhaps having an option to choose a difficulty or retry/skip battles.
You did a really nice job of making them all unique though. The action sequences all look good, and the only thing I think is a bit strange is the animation you used for Maddy's All Out Block, and perhaps a warning of the 1 turn cool down in the description would have been helpful. I did get myself stuck again though. I'm up to the third battle in the chase scene with Emma, and I just can't figure out how to overcome her Killing Venom All since I still don't have access to the All Out Block.
There was one little thing I noticed;
You can fix the autotile edge by using a technique called shift-click mapping (tut is for VX ACE but it's the same in MV.)
Overall, the game just isn't for me, but I am impressed with it. I can't imagine how much testing you must have done to get the battles just about beatable. The effort that's gone into the characterisation is great, and it's really easy to see how much Maddy and Caroline love and lean on each other, although a little more fluff and flirting never hurts ;p My personal advice/bias which you can totally ignore if it's not your focus, but I would have like a little more exploration. We get warped out of maps before being able to have a proper wander round. For example in the house, a bit of freedom to optionally walk around and interact with their belongings, hear some things about their past, and then being able to leave whenever you're ready to continue on might have been nice.
Otherwise, keep up the good work! :D
This is super useful feedback thank you so much! This is totally the kind of stuff about conveying information I wanted feedback on when more people started playing it. I'm glad everything seems to be working. And I didn't know about the shift-click thing that seems really helpful! Good story advice too.
AS FOR the battles yeah that one is tricky. Not to spoil too much but that's the last fight in the game so you were pretty much there. For anyone who wants the solution, copy and paste this following paragraph into rot13.com:
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Thanks for playing!