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Review for the Secret Santa forum. (Oh hey cool, you got our game this round and I got yours.)

To start this off, I'd like to say that I played this a day or two ago. I wasn't able to write out the review until now, so please forgive me if my memory makes any mistakes.

Allusion - I'll admit that I haven't looked into the background of all the characters, but I know that Eremiel is a real biblical angel, (though a different version of her name is more popular.) And your game is based off of biblical themes, like heaven and hell, what the angel did, the Christian God. It gives everyone a chance to know more about the story by knowing about the bible or get a chance to research it, so that's pretty cool.

Pixel Movement - I think it's good and bad. For movement it works really well for an action game, but the collision system suffers because of it. I understand that it's mainly a problem with RPG Maker, but a developer should be careful of what his tools can and can't do.

Movement speed - To start, I don't actually know if you can fine tune the movement speed for RPGM MV. I'm personally in the mindset that the walking speed is too slow, but I see the argument that sprinting is too fast. One of the biggest problems I had with movement speed is how it forced me to play the game. Every time there was an enemy with more than one health, or even a swarm of enemies, if I wanted to fight them I'd have to constantly run away and turn around for a second to take a quick shot and keep running away. When you factor in the range of the shots, the time between every shot and that it's easy to be swarmed by enemies that can take a few hits you don't have much choice but to keep your distance. And because the enemies move only slightly slower than you, it often turns into you constantly running away because you can't make enough distance. The speed, felt a lot more balanced and appropriate for boss fights, but wasn't quite right for the random enemy spawns.

Zoom in - I really like this.  Zooming in during cut scenes and inside shops gets rid of all the negative space. Well done.

Maps - Your individual rooms are well designed. Your large caves and rooms have good aesthetics to them. The artistic design is good here. On the other side of the coin, the map layout isn't super great. The large open areas don't offer a reason to explore beyond the spirits, and the route to the actual path is obscure and you're just as likely to find the exit as a dead end. Without any variation the cave or ice theme looks identical between every room, bringing into question why you need more than one room. Especially when considering the walking speed and the size of the maps, you can take 3 minutes to walk all the way back to a boss, and that's only after you've memorised the route.

Power Ups - These are great, they really help to keep the game from going stale, all in all I really like this feature.

Random Spawn - Mostly not great. They can help to keep things fresh if you need to cross an area more than once, but the enemies can really stack up. Sometimes while going after a boss I'll get blocked by 6 enemies who can take plenty of hits and after cornering me they'll drop me to a quarter health all at once leaving the boss fight significantly harder than a run where almost no enemies block me. 

Save Points - The system is sort of cool, but the 3 minute hike back to a boss fight was not. 

Boss fights - These were of course the highlight of the game. On average they were pretty good, though they can be pretty tedious if you don't position yourself to avoid the projectiles, because you won't be able to dodge them with the slow walking speed. I enjoyed most of the boss fights, though the teleporting one was the least fun. I could only get a few shots off at best or miss entirely before he teleported which made the fight very slow. Some of the fights had a small amount of scrolling, which was jarring when you crossed over the middle of the room as the screen shifted. The last fight was okay, as all of it scrolled, but it then made finding the power ups hard as they didn't always spawn on screen. Though I found that some boss fights could have been easier with certain upgrades, but you don't know which ones you'll need until the fight comes up, like projectile speed being almost useless until the second last boss.

Cutscene Character Movement - This is my all time favourite part of the game. Having the characters move deliberately during conversations brings out their emotions. Pacing back and forth, turning away, all that; it's great. It's not a common thing to see done, let alone done so well. I'd love to know what your inspiration was for this.

Overall I liked the bossfights, but didn't enjoy travelling between them or walking from my last save to the boss fight. It's good but those parts really took away from my experience. I hope this review is helpful.

To start off, thank you very much for your review.  I'm actually very close to having an updated version of Eremiel ready to post in the forums and your feedback is very helpful.

All of the characters are indeed pulled from biblical sources, although mostly from apocrypha, not canonical.  None of them, including Eremiel, have much if any lore written about them that I could find.  I chose lesser-known figures on purpose so I'd have more of a blank slate to work with and to keep the story more personal and small scale.  In a single hour, when most of your time is running around blasting monsters, there's just not enough time to develop more than a couple characters so I focused on the main two.

As far as the things you didn't like about the game, I'm working on improving as much as I can in those areas, especially with pacing, balancing and bringing more humanity to the lost souls you rescue.  I also appreciate the complements on the things you did like.  It's always good to know the things I got right, too.

My inspiration for cutscene character movement is a little tricky to pin down.  I just kind of did it naturally but just about everything we do draws inspiration from other sources.  I'd have to put credit in a couple of places.  When I first started messing with RPG Maker about a year and a half ago, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn everything I could about the program.  One source was Echo607.  I distinctly remember her talking about having your characters move around during cutscenes to break up the monotony of just reading text back and forth as your characters talk.  The other big influence was probably Final Fantasy 6.  It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time and the characters do a lot of the things you mention (pacing back and forth, turning away etc).  I wished for, and I believe even asked for, more character poses from the generator like sitting, kneeling, raising your arms in the air and such and FF6 was specifically in my mind when doing so.  The characters do a lot of these kinds of things in that game and it makes the cutscenes in that game a joy to watch.

Thank you again for your review!  I really appreciate it.  I'm certainly not expecting it but if you'd like to help me continue to improve this game in the future, look for my updated version in the forums very soon.  I had a lot of fun making this one and hope to nail down this type of action mechanic as best I can to make it a fun experience throughout the entire game.  Take care.