Another excellent title that really personified what this jam was all about. Some of the battles were a little rough, but it was also incredibly forgiving. I wasn't able to beat it in the full hour so my thoughts are only on that hour, but this game hit all the right notes. Loved the art as well.

Suggestion: Maybe give some more guidance to weaknesses for enemies. Or, give another option for damage for the enemies that you HAVE to counterattack.

This was a very fascinating experience that left me with mixed emotions. Mostly good, but definitely mixed.

The presentation, writing (minus one grammatical error towards the beginning), and social commentary were impeccable, and I found myself constantly engaged by the humor and wit. The mapping was basic but effective, with a completely custom tile set to complement the custom characters, battlers, and backgrounds - all of which were stylistically sound and well executed, although I think the battle graphics didn't quite mesh with the map scenes. I only found one mapping error where you can walk through the side of the mountain (directly before the area transition), while everything else was well-constructed.

I initially didn't like not being able to access some kind of menu outside of save points, but it's completely  forgivable since there's no inventory, skill progression, etc. The custom menus, fonts, and other UI elements looked fantastic. Had I not known beforehand that this was an RM game, I would have been 50/50 at best to guess which engine it was made it. Technically speaking, super impressive.

The save points were frequent enough, and healing in between fights was welcome considering that each encounter was meant to be a self-contained challenge rather than part of a long marathon. E.G. it's not Dragon-Quest, resource-drain-style combat. I'm not a big fan of that approach except for bosses, but that's purely subjective and I got used to it.

The $ spending puzzle was great - at least the first couple times; I think it should have had one or maybe even two fewer rounds. (once you got the pattern it was just a lot of spamming Confirm anyways). That said, I appreciated how the puzzle fit thematically into the environment, and it was one of many great moments in that sequence. The PIN thing seemed weird to me, as unless I skipped some clues there was no way to realistically guess it (I mean brute force I guess?) However it was a good sequence regardless, and I would just suggest dealing with the employees should just be the mandatory solution.

Unfortunately my main fault with this game - one of the features I was most looking forward to, looking at the previews - was the battle system itself. There were some great ideas that faltered on execution, and it kind of dragged down the pacing and fun of the game.

The weakness system was clever, but it got repetitive very quickly monsters had way too much health in my opinion. Additionally, some of the enemy weaknesses were intuitive while others felt completely out of left field, which made some of the later encounters with only a single weakness frustrating (imagine using all 8 skill types until you finally get the right one - that's 80 AP, so you gotta do at least 3 Attacks per character to figure out how to proceed.) I also found it odd that a few enemies required counter strategies because they Resisted everything and had super high Defense, but there was no synergy between taunts and counters as they both lasted 1 turn / 1 attack. Waiting for RNG so those Shield monsters would trigger the counter felt like a time sink.

The stars added an interesting element, but I felt like there was untapped potential there as no skills cost 3 stars and the 1-star abilities were a bit underwhelming; generally you just built up to 2, used Charge / Focus, and won the next turn.

I did like that the "taunt and shield" strategy that worked great for the first boss wasn't reliable on the second boss unless you took down the minions first; that was a super neat way of re-using a fight mechanic but making it different enough to feel fresh. The bosses were definitely interesting to figure out, and each one "got" me on the first try. So in terms of challenge in those fights, it felt about perfect to me.

The field encounters were a bit less satisfying as that's where some of the odd balance stuff really came up. I would have liked to see Guard award more AP, mitigate more damage, or both, as it wasn't really useful except in corner cases where you needed exactly 5 AP and maybe the incidental defense was a bonus. The Stances also made a pretty inconsequential difference, and I think there might have even been an issue with how they were implemented as the damage from some enemies seemed to go up in Defensive stance (unless it was super bad RNG). 

One last note on combat, there really didn't seem to be a reason to give the female character an Attack skill as there wasn't a single enemy in the game which it dealt more than 1 damage to (this mostly bothered me because Attack, unlike most of the battle commands, didn't have a click-to-confirm, which caused more than a few input errors as I was learning the system). Though it did create a tradeoff of sorts since you weren't guarding, since defensive tactics were generally discouraged it was almost always better to gain 15 AP and take full damage instead of gaining 5 AP and taking 75% damage (if you think about it that's 225% total damage received to gain the same AP over 3 turns, which isn't generally favorable).
Note, I DO appreciate trying to make Guard interesting, it just wasn't on the mark IMO.

Overall this game made me think more than almost any other entry from this jam, and I have to give credit for the complexity and ambition demonstrated here. You took some risks, and a lot of them paid off while other systems just needed a bit more time to tune/refine in my view. This game absolutely has tons of potential to develop further!

So, great job despite the wall of text above (sorry!) I hope the detailed account of what worked and didn't (for me) is helpful in moving the project forward.

Please see Teal's play-through video, as well as her review of the game in the video description:

I was really, really impressed by this one. One would have no idea what engine it was created in if not for the telling .exe. Custom graphics, music, novel mix of plugins, all lent a unique feel. The game really gave me the impression that this dev understands the engine and what it is capable of.

Combat I found great. It was challenging, but each enemy was definitely beatable with the right strategy. There were meaningful choices to maximize your accrual of AP and stars while staying alive. My chief (non)complaint is that by the time I was ready to set up my ultimate 3.5 x damage "Amazing" attack, the bosses were already about dead. There was a lot of strategy involved in responding correctly to incoming charge attacks, and messing up once and after losing battle once, I realized what I had to do in order to survive. It's hard to make a game that can create such a satisfying feeling of failing, then understanding, and this game really nailed it.

Puzzles were pretty cool too. I enjoyed buying stuff for some reason and guessing the PIN. It felt like choices had some weight to them, and there were different approaches one could make to the challenges.

I found the game surprisingly funny and well written, with just the right amount of moral ambiguity. The dialog between the two MCs was really engaging. Across pretty much any metric I think this game did great. My top pic (out of the 12 I played so far).

Amazing battle system, I love it! If you continue this game an advice: in the first world I think you need to tone down the enemies, and maybe revisit the guard effect (maybe give 10 ap instead of 5). 

The style is unique and the screen resolution in my opinion is perfect! The idea of Bookmarked is very original and opens up to a lot of possibilities and different worlds, so kudos! 

Due to the time limitations of the jam I understand that there is no menu but I guess you'll work on it. ;-) I'm surely keep an eye on this project, well done (and five stars for me)! 

Hi, I just finished the game. Your art is amazing, I'm super impressed with what you were able to do in only a month. 

I ran into some bugs, but I see they've already been mentioned below.

You have a very cool and unique battle system, but I must admit it took me a while to get used to it. I never found out the slime's other weakness (I only discovered Thunder). Also Mari died a lot while battling, which was very frustrating. In particular the battle with the three monsters (right before the first boss) I had to redo six times before I finally won. (I honestly was about to give up.) It seemed to me that 90% of the time they were targeting Mari. This made it super difficult to get anything done.
That said I had less issue with those boxes, as I quickly realized I needed to use counter.
Some other thing that confused me a lot in the beginning, was the fact that Attack was already targeted, so I didn't need to click on it first and then the target the enemy. I often forgot this in the beginning and ended up attacking the wrong enemy.

For the money minigame, I was surprised when it continued after a third time. I agree it felt too long. I would just do three rounds of it, instead of five.

There's no menu?

You did an amazing job. I'm definitely intrigued and interested in playing a continuation of this.

Managed to break the game within the first few minutes of playing, in the forest to mountain area due to passability and how your transfer works, which caused me to end up stuck.

The weaknesses often seemed unintuitive. What looked like a monster that should be weak to one thing ended up weak to something else. 

No enemy seemed to be a 'flying' type, so that seemed like a waste, especially with the cost of skills. It was annoying trying to figure out the weaknesses because if you messed up, you had to waste 2-4 turns to recharge.

The elemental bonuses sometimes just seemed pretty weak to the point where for one encounter, I was using the stars to heal instead.

The stance thing isn't really explained well and definitely could have used letting the player automatically temporarily change stances for certain actions such as charge and guard where it would make more sense to be in defense stance.

No memory for the cursor so it was a pain to use and was easy to make mistakes.

Some of the fights basically just revolved around charging for your skill + charge, using the skill, then repeating.

Other fights had one character that was almost useless to the point where killing them off made the battles faster and easier.

The shield enemies are especially annoying since counterattack doesn't work when they keep attacking Mari, so I ended up having to let Mari die.

The money minigame seemed a bit too long and easy. I used a simple formula that just worked and so the minigames ended up being tedious instead of challenging.

How does the physical fighter know the player is a magic user right away?

The worlds are destroyed, but we are fine as are things we are carrying even if they are from the worlds?

If you lose a battle and return to the title screen, it is blank, but if you return to the title screen via the ending, it shows the image again.

Hi Aldu,

As per your preference in our discussion on Discord, I'm posting my feedback here. Note that I'm going to focus only on the gameplay/game design aspect, as that's the area I understand you're looking for the most feedback in.

1. Stance System

I think players would be better served if the tutorial mentioned something about the Stance system, even if it's just a one-liner. With the way the tutorial is setup right now, I felt hand-held towards using Lunge right away after being handed the controls, instead of exploring all the different command options.

2. Battle System

Having read your responses to the other feedback, I can appreciate how you came about designing the battle system, but I think there are a few problems you might've overlooked in its implementation:

A) The 'choices' are an illusion. Even though you have 4 elemental spells and 4 physical types, as well as 2 different power levels (AP vs. Stellar) of each ability, the reality is that there's no actual meaningful choice given to the player throughout all the encounters. I might have missed an enemy encounter or two, but from what I remember fighting, not a single enemy has more than one elemental and one physical type weakness. This means that as soon as the player discovers an enemy's weakness, there is only ONE optimal order of using commands to dispatch them as quickly as possible. Of course, during the process of building up AP/Stellar to unleash the appropriate Ability, there might be a need to heal, but that, again, is not a real 'choice' for the player.

As a thought exercise, what if each enemy had 2 elemental and 2 physical weaknesses, AND each of the elemental/physical abilities have an additional effect that is triggered if it is Stellar against the enemy? For example, on the element side, an enemy could be weak against Fire AND Thunder, and if it's hit with Fire, it's afflicted by a damage-over-time status (like Burn), whereas if it's hit with Thunder, it becomes stunned for one turn (Shock). By doing this, you've now designed a system that allows situations to play out where a player might decide to use one vs. the other depending on whether they want to kill the enemy faster vs. preventing the enemy from attacking them.

B) The weaknesses are not intuitive, and it feels BAD when you guess the wrong. In my playthrough, I think the only enemy I knew what the weakness was before hitting them was the bird. Now, I might just be bad/unlucky at the game (I also didn't know that cats hate water because, well, I don't particularly care for cats), but I also felt misdirected by it. For example, the Slash ability description reads that it's good against small enemies, but visually, none of the enemies in the first few encounters (Slime, Goblin, Cactus) are different in size; as it turns out, I don't think any of them WERE weak to Slash. The problem is that usually, in most games, indie or commercial,  there's the expectation that starting monsters ARE small compared to late-game enemies or bosses, and since I haven't seen that many enemies, I would have no way of knowing what you, the designer, means when you say "small", making the weakness system seem like total guess-work.

Compounding this feeling of disappointment is the annoyance of needing to build AP after the first bad (or even good) guess. By having characters' starting AP at 25, ability cost at 20, and AP recovery via normal attack at 15, the player experience gets progressively WORSE for each wrong guess they make:

The first wrong guess will cost the player one turn of normal attack before they can use another ability, and the second wrong guess will cost the player TWO turns of normal attacks to get enough AP again. However, at that point, the player also probably needs to use Healing, which also expends AP, so this delays the third attempt even further. And, speaking from experience, by THAT time, I had frankly forgotten which types of attacks I had tried on both characters.

C) Not having a weakness exploitable by one character, or at all. This is probably the biggest issue I have. In addition to the issues laid out in B), when I run into an enemy (slime, for example) that only has weaknesses that can be exploited by one character, the other character becomes dead weight, and that player experience feels awful. Not to mention, since healing is only available on the female character, the battle drags out unnecessarily long.

In terms of the enemies with NO weakness (the Shield-like enemy), I was lucky in that I correctly surmised you wanted players to use the male character's Counter ability, but I'd have to 100% agree with Drifty here that by not having Provoke last longer than 1 turn, you are now inadvertently using RNG (ie. who the enemy targets) to determine whether a player, who already knows exactly what needs to happen, can progress in a timely manner or not. (And let's not forget both Counter and Provoke uses AP...)

3. The A2Z Mini Game

I personally don't have an issue with solving straight-up math problems as a mini-game/diversion, but I think it overstayed it's welcome given how many times I needed to do them. The main problem is that beyond appreciating the puzzle for what it is when I first encountered it, there's just no FUN to be found in doing these puzzles. There's no connection, system-wise, that the math puzzle has to the rest of the game; if, alternatively, the puzzle was able to tie in hints to the weaknesses of enemies, or if it unlocked power-ups that increased starting AP based on whether you get the answer in one try, or just have SOME sort of tie-in to the rest of the game, I think it would make the player FEEL a lot better and accomplished to clear it.

Concluding Thoughts

Having said all that, the game isn't BAD. In fact, I would argue that based on the aesthetics and customized features alone, this game will probably rank in the Top 10. Honestly, this was the first game I played BECAUSE I wanted my mind blown after seeing the preview snippets you've shared. 

Based on reading some of your comments, I wonder if the underlying issue is that perhaps you were too focused on building something uniquely different from the "standard RM fare", that you overlooked the more fundamental question of "is this system FUN?"

I hope you found this useful, and thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Cool custom battle system! I liked the choice of using stars to use stronger versions of the skills. Winning battles really depends on finding the enemy's weaknesses and taking advantage of them.

It does take a few goes to learn the system, which leads to the beginning battles to drag out a bit and may overwhelm new players (balancing issues which you have addressed in your other comments).  However, once you get past that hurdle, the remaining battles are quite fun to do.

Nice job!

This game was really fun to play! The battles can be quite challenging sometimes, which is really fun for me! Also, the animations (specially the battle ones) are really amazing! Nice job!

That's some heavy title screen music, very metal.  Nice animations and I like how you zoom into a digitized google page, this game is cute.  The battle system is really good and the whole getting trapped in a cursed computer thing is very clever. I love this take on "Touch the Stars", very different and interesting. 

The music isn't bad but it gets repetitive fast and it's a little too intense at times. One person can only sustain sooo much double bass. :)  The battles take way too long and at some point you just have to turn off the sound because it's so overwhelming. 

There's an interesting progression system that grants permanent stat points upon winning in combat, but no actual level system. This is still a progression system and I like it.

Provoke should last for more than one round so that you can use the follow-up skill, counter. Otherwise, how it is now, counter is a useless waste of AP.

I like the ability to use your skills with AP or Stars, it's a pretty cool idea.

The game is actually very short, but the battles are incredible long and time consuming. It feels very padded and this is a big issue I have with this game. 

This game gets a lot right, but the artificial padding and making the battles soo long for no good reason really hurt the score. 

Good job with a unique battle system, I hope the numbers are balanced in the next version of it.

This game is genuinely entertaining in personality and charm and I believe this game to be a sleeper hit. The combat is interesting, the themes are subtly and directly implied. The presentation is very well made despite bugs and a couple of jank movements here and there. I applaud this game and hoped to see this game to completion someday.

One minor thing I noticed is this issue here and a wording choice issue after the 1st boss: 

This game shows a lot of promise and dedication and it shows.