Sent here to do a Secret Santa Review from the similarly-named forum on the RPG Maker website.
The game overall is really good. Personally I'm not a fan of turn based combat though I enjoyed the gameplay in this one. Though, I did end up feeling a tad over powered for later parts of the game. (This may have something to do with the fact that I did all those 9 extra battles right off the hop, instead of waiting to do them later. lol)
PROS
The atmosphere - The game starts out raining and grim, and it holds the grim tone for the whole event. The weather, the art style, and the way the characters talk, all really strengthen your immersion. You have peasants who talk informally and nobles who speak with a rich vocabulary. You have dark caves, misty forests and rain soaked towns. The colour palette is subdued and often grey. Every single part of the game belongs together, to strengthen the emotion that plot pulls out. Speaking of which...
The plot - I really got pulled into the plot of the game. No spoilers here, but I really liked the theme of "We were once friends, but our duty forces us to fight."
The setting - I'm a fan of Tolkien and other fantasy epics, and this reminded me of them. You've created a cool world. I like it.
Battle system - Now this is where it really shines. Each and every character is unique, all with their own personalities, but also with move sets. Every basic attack is unique, some inflict a stagger effect, or heal the attacker, or whatever. And then alongside that, no special move is the same. Some do more damage based off all the debuffs the defender has, all the way to reviving dead allies, and no one shares these abilities on their lists. Every character is useful for their own reasons. Instead of having a "mana" bar, limiting the amount of moves you get per fight, the game uses cooldown, forcing you to choose whether now is a good time to attack, or to see if it's going to be more useful in a few turns. It alsos breaks apart the problem of mana/energy bars, where you only really have one good move, and all the other moves are backup. There's also two different bars that measure a character's health. There's your actual health bar, and then a bar called "protection" sort of like a second health bar, which opens up new possibilities for healing. no longer do you just say "Well I guess my party is under fifty percent health, so I'll just heal them for fifty percent," you now get to make a more active decision as most healing moves heal both health and protection. It turns into "is it worth recovering my protection or should I wait to lose some health first so I don't waste all that health that I could heal waiting for this cooldown?" And this isn't just the playable characters that have unique moves either. Every single enemy has unique moves that even you don't have access to, making you need to carefully watch your enemy and judge which is the biggest threat that you need to take out. All in all I was really immersed by the combat which isn't a normal thing for me and turn based fights.
CONS
I want more - You can consider this as not a con, since I actually want to see where you're going to take the rest of the game, but it's kind of a demo, a "first chapter". I want to know what happens next, gosh darn.
The buffs and debuffs - This is more of a personal complaint, as my vision is SUPER poor. I had a hard time reading what the text on the buffs and debuffs say on that very tiny font. I did play in fullscreen and still had that problem. This might not be a huge concern as most of your players won't be as blind as me, but you may want to consider visibility when you finish the rest of the story.
The prologue - I actually really enjoyed the prologue, I played through it twice and enjoyed it twice, and it really set the player up for the rest of the story. My one complaint about it, at least the first time around, was that it felt too fast. I was struggling to take in a LOT of information very quickly. There's five characters in the party at the beginning of the game and I had just barely gotten a grasp of who they are before the prologue ended. It was only when I was on my second playthrough that I realised that the main dude was even related to anyone from the prologue,
Some bugs here and there - First off, if you leave the first town and then immediately return to it, you just get a black screen, (but I reloaded a save from the menu, so I was safe.) The other thing was that it seemed that if I started training before I gathered my party, my dude would limp around at one health, but later on, you restore every battle. There was also a purchasable companion thing. It seemed that I could purchase multiple copies of them, but only one showed up in my retinue. And then there was this thing that I wouldn't call a glitch, but your lighting in the caves focused on the middle of the screen and not the character, so when the character was at the edge of the screen/cave, they were hidden in the dark. This made finding things in the dark a bit harder (though I am blind) but it would still look aesthetically better focused on the character instead of on the middle of the screen,
HOW I PLAYED
This one might be slightly spoiler-y, but I won't give away the ending. If you want a pure playthrough though, skip to the next section and play it for yourself, it's a pretty good game.
Alrighty. So the first thing I did was collect all the random loot in town. Then when I met up with my party, I went and sold it all and bought everyone higher ranking weapons and armour. After that I did all of the 9 bonus fights (the last one was kind of random, I kept using the same strategy of kill the weaker ones off first and then the strongest last, sometimes 4 out of 5 of my allies were dead before I got to go, and sometimes it just barely got me to the last enemy. Eventually I did win though. So I used the bonus currency to bump special attack and counter attack and some other thing that I forgot for all the characters. I was actually a bit too tough after I left town, and no fight was enough to wipe out my party, though a few fights early on were pretty close. I ended up giving most of the leveling orbs and power orbs to one guy, making him the most buff dude in our party, while the healer got all the hp, because all my healing was based on his HP. I found that the fight you had to last 5 rounds in kind of sucked because I easily lasted 5 rounds, I was THAT close to killing the last enemy, I could probably get the last enemy dead if I did another playthrough. But anyway, it was a real bummer that everyone was retreating because of plot reasons when I was actually doing pretty well in the fight. I might recommend having more reinforcements and maybe tougher attacks in the final round, so it doesn't feel like the player is "totally winning this fight" before suddenly being told that they basically lost.
IN CONCLUSION
I really liked playing this game and it's atmosphere in general. Even though it's still in its demo version I think it's worth playing in its current state. I'd really like to revisit this game once you've finished it, and I think everyone should give it a try as it's a pretty good entry.
Cheers, and good luck on the contest.