Rating games based on the Judge categories

Gameplay

The battle system felt rather confusing at first, even with the tutorials. I got the hang of it pretty quick however. Sadly, the game crashed about 30 mins in during one of the battles. Could not get too far and it had been a while since my last save.

Even though I could grasp how the battle system worked, the timing and animations for choosing which action to do next felt a little iffy. Sometimes I would try to do an action and either do nothing or find out I had another buffered from before

The symbol map system was a really neat way to present the dungeon crawler experience.

[15/20]

Presentation

Art is very nice, and the sprites give a lot of life to the battles (even though the enemies are all static, as far as I could tell). The whole aesthetic of the game was cool.

The story had too much exposition in the beginning for my liking, specially since we don't see even a preview of how the Illuminate look like.

Music and sfx were nice and fit the action

[15/20]

Engagement

The battle system feels satisfying and the multiple difficulty levels, alongside the ability to skip battles, makes for a great player experience. I think this one can retain players very well

[16/20] -> Doubled to 32

Potential

This game certainly has potential. The battle system is unique in the genre and the world has room to expand (as long as it does away with too much exposition)

[16/20]

Total: 78/100 (4 Stars)

I finished the demo on Nightmare, which felt harder than in Promise due to the lack of skills and being outnumbered four-to-two in certain mobs. Fortunately, the reroll feature alleviates this somewhat and the bigger mobs become doable after leveling a bit.

The link attack system really made it easy to accumulate EX, which made up for the duo's current lack of EP arts. I'm curious about how link attacks will work when there are three party members, unless you plan on limiting the party to two for the entire game.

Still, it would be nice if the enemy HP display also showed what buffs/debuffs they currently have. It's pretty hard to fight strategically unless you're aware of enemy status at all times. My current workaround is to cast my buffs and debuffs in the same turn so that they wear off at the same time, allowing me to know when to EX Heal and cast them again.

I feel like the game dumps you into the middle of a plot without much context, almost as if I was dumped into a midgame area. I guess this is forgivable since it's a demo, though the full version should at least introduce the characters and the curse better. There are some moments where I think a CG could help, like one showing what the airship looks like or one showing the effects of the curse.

This line of the tutorial says "Sacred Earth: Promise," even though the title of this demo should be "Sacred Earth - New Theory".

Some lines in the tutorial have cut-off text:

Finally, what happened to Gunnar using dual pistols? Are we going to have to rename him Bowwar Myrrine now?

good art!

There's an impressive amount of work in this for the 1 month time period. Not sure how much of the systems and assets were made specifically for this contest (as it looks like this game is a part of a series),  but kuddos.

The dungeon system was pretty cool. I like the TP management and the branching dungeon and random battle/trap difficulties were neat (although exploitable through save scumming, but what can ya do lol). I had a rough patch where because the only healing can be done with a skill that costs 25EX in battle, I had to pray I could build up enough EX before getting killed. Not sure if there were items somewhere I was missing. If not, adding some alternative ways to heal might be a good idea, otherwise a player can easily get stuck.

Storywise, I wasn't too engaged. The characters were talking about things I have no knowledge of. Outside of the intro tho, the story didn't seem to matter too much to the dungeon crawling gameplay.

I feel like it would be better to roll the dungeon and battle tutorials out a little slower, That section of the demo felt veeeeeeerrryyy dense and it wasn't easy to retain the information that was dumped on me there.

The battle system was nice. The sprite animations are fantastic. All the different poses Gunner takes while firing his bow had me laughing. Sadly, the game locked up in one of my fights and crashed. There was, weirdly enough, no error screen so I'm not really sure what happened.  I stopped playing around there.

All in all, this was an impressive showing! The gameplay greatly outshines the story and characters.