Hello! Welcome to Feedback Quest 7! My name's Hythrain and I'm one of the hosts and one of the streamers for this event! This feedback is being written live as I stream your game! If you're interested in seeing my live reaction, let me know and I can send you a link to the VOD once it's posted to YouTube!
So my normal approach for any game in these events is simple: I get the game, make sure it's not a virus, then play it with as little information on how to play as possible. This way, I can judge how intuitively someone can figure out the game. Only if it's obvious that I need to read more will I do so. I note this so you can get a sense where some of these feedback comes from. In addition, I want to note that feedback and rating are different; don't use this feedback to gauge what I'll rate, nor should you view my rating as entirely indicative of my feedback.
To start, I like the visual look. I'm always a fan of pixel art and seeing how well people can work with it. So right off the bat, a point in favour of this game. What I didn't like was how utterly confusing the gameplay itself was. Trying to figure out what Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald did and how they worked required me to read up on it primarily because my first enemy was the Fairy, who would get double-cast almost every turn and thus nullify most of what I did. Once I did have an idea of how to play, I began to make some headway. However, this was ultimately riddled with its own issues. Here's a shortlist of things that didn't make sense:
1. I would use Heal only for it to not move my health bar at all. The music changing would indicate the heal worked, but without any sort of numerical evidence I couldn't determine if I was fine.
2. Enemies attack so fast compared to the player. This becomes very noticeable with certain enemies, such as the fairy with its constant double attacks.
3. There's no clear indication of when it's the player's turn. There are icons that seem to mark waiting for the next turn, but it's not entirely clear. For turn-based combat, not having a clear idea of when it's my turn can make it frustrating.
4. Exchange seems to be broken. The first few times I used Exchange, it did nothing. When it began to do stuff, it would instant KO me instead of what it was supposed to do.
5. There was some weird UI glitches after killing myself with Exchange. When I'd return into a new battle, the UI would be set to access the spells and not let me choose one of the gems. I'm forced to use a spell to fix it.
There are more things I feel I could talk about, but these felt like the big things for me. The way things are now, the game isn't intuitive because it hides information in its UI. Bring that information to the front more and it'll be easier for players to see what's going on and to figure out what their actions are doing.
That's all I got for now. Good luck in the event!