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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.

When I started this up, I thought I was in for a typical RPG Maker game. I was surprised when the opening combat was a tactical RPG fight. Ok, this caught my interest. It then switched to a ground area, which also caught my eye. The opening combat was tough, but I was able to get through pretty easily. I was into the story in general, and particularly liked how you could run over people's bodies to search them for items. The speed of it all was nice, as well. However, by contrast it felt like I was being bombed with so much information and not being taught any of it. The skill tree's design is honestly a mess, both in UI and structure. It gives the player way too many things to look at and consider all at once, instead of easing the player into it.

And then I got to Echo Base and was met with the most brutal fight I'd ever seen in an RPG Maker game. Three of the enemies are capable of doing over 500 damage to every target, which is enough to wipe out your entire team if the RNG is unfair. Now I figured maybe I could dive into my skill tree and try to learn stuff, so this was when I finally went deeper into the tree and was actively trying to learn stuff.  After learning enough to build some skills out and try to make my team more effective, I promptly got curb stomped as the RNG rolled into the situation I described above. Alright then, one more go. This time it worked, but only because the RNG was way more fair for me. I then went into the next tactical battle, which was a lot of fun. I then continued through the story up to the point where your team decides to go to Moletown.

This brings me to my main criticism and it's something I find exists in most RPG Maker games: incredible game difficulty by treating enemies and players as equals. Don't know what I mean? Lemme explain...

Normally in RPGs, player characters have a much lower max HP than bosses do. While the team may have 50 HP, the boss will have 500 HP. Damage, therefore, is based around doing far smaller amounts of damage. RPG Maker games tend to not do this, however, instead putting HP and stats in the same area for players and enemies. They also then do similar amounts of damage to each other. However, doing so makes RNG much more randomly deadly, especially as you add more enemies into the fight. And while I can understand why some people can prefer this, it's just not enjoyable when you're going to regularly fight 7 enemies. If RNG is bad, that has the risk of a player being just wiped out before they've had a chance to have a turn on a single character. I'd recommend changing this all up to make RNG less broken.

Thanks for the feedback, it's appreciated. All will be used to refine/improve the franchise. As a solo developer, not always able to test every scenario, but seeing how each person plays it a bit differently helps us to refine it to be better/more balanced.

As far as how we wanted combat to work. We wanted a "quick to kill/Quick to die" system. Not trying to have like 30 minute long battles or whatever. There's a little bit of RNG jank though as a result sometimes. It's a continuous process of evolution.

See, I had a feeling that was the design intent (quick to kill, quick to die). Trying to avoid 30 minute battles is always a good idea, but when RNG jank can make you take 30 minutes anyway? What was the point, right? Also, no matter what system, making OP AOE skills is always an issue. In the fight that kept killing me, I was getting mowed down by attacks that hit my entire party for around 500 damage per person. A far more reasonable amount of damage for that attack would've been 150 per person.

Yeah it's weird though because whenever I've fought that part and had some of the  right mix of skills and equipment it was super easy. But it's one part that some people get massively obliterated in with the game. With 7 battlers and yeah the RNG sometimes, sometimes some unpredictable things happen. Still working on the overall balance for the larger game.