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(+1)

For better or for worse, this game is a lot of great ideas that just don't quite work, at least not in their current form.

The game started off really strong. It's got an intro explaining the premise and setting things up. In a jam game, that deserves props for just having it! It's got detailed environments and lots of animation, too, which really helps sell the whole thing.

Minor nitpick: the menu would look better without the screenshot of the game in the background. You've got that wonderful graphic of the title character, emphasize it!

The RPG Maker stock graphics and music are whatever, value-neutral at best, but they're used pretty well here, and with some of the effects make for some scenes with a surprising amount of audio and visual appeal. Of particular note are the initial market scene and the transformation sequence.

At the end of the prologue I was left with more questions than answers, though. I was following along with the idyllic village that gets attacked and the magical cat getting transformed, but then it jumped to a completely different place, talking about some empire and a bunch of rebels (by the way who are the good guys here?). Then we're back to the cat, but in what seems to be a completely different context. Then back to the empire and the rebels and some guy who I think is supposed to have some significance but I don't know. I'm still not sure what the catgirl was doing on the roof or how "watch a meteor shower" went to "fighting monsters in another dimension".

It almost feels at times like the intros to three vaguely related games were mashed together. I get that they all tie into each other, but I don't understand how, and they don't flow smoothly when put together either.

The prologue is also really, really long. I would have liked to have meaningful gameplay a lot earlier. With that being said, this would be much less of an issue with the full-length game as the intro would then be shorter relative to the rest of the game.

Once we got into the game, well... I don't want to say things went downhill fast. I'm a fan of hyperbole, but that's excessively negative, even for me. But a lot of the aspects that were very strong in the intro were not as strong here.

The dungeon feels really generic. Rock textures, random layout, a handful of stock props scattered around randomly. It really has that feel of a dungeon for a sake of a dungeon. It doesn't help that due to the aforementioned issues I'm not exactly sure what that place is supposed to be or why we're here.

The tutorial images were blurry. This is probably an RPG Maker limitation, and I'm not sure if it's something someone without a Retina or 4K monitor would notice.

Lampshading what seems to be a technical limitation as a game mechanic is funny for a bit, but it doesn't make said technical limitation disappear.

There's an extremely heavy emphasis on combat, which makes sense given the themes of the jam, but that means the game basically lives or dies by its combat, and the combat isn't quite good enough to carry the game.

Having a real-time, overworld battle system in RPG Maker at all is impressive in a "I can't believe you accomplished x in y" way, and I applaud that. On the other hand, it's super janky, and doesn't play all that well. Neither movement nor attacks are very responsive. In particular, it seems you have to wait for certain animations to play, during which you have no control. The control layout is kinda awkward, and I kept going in and out of aim mode by accident. Finally, having to stop to shoot sucks.

While not a technical issue, I'm not a fan of how bullet-spongey the enemies are.

In the first combat section, I kept defeating the enemies, and they kept getting back up. Eventually after defeating one of them again, they all died and there was a cutscene. I have no idea what happened here, if it was a glitch or intentional, or why.

The second enemy swarm was a bit ridiculous. I would have struggled with the sheer number of enemies in any game, and the clunky controls and general awkwardness turned it into a frustrating mess here. I ended up backed into a corner, got swarmed, and died.

If the combat could be tightened up and some of the gameplay issues solved, I think it could make for a really fun game. If that's not possible, it would probably be best to rebalance things so combat is shorter and easier, and maybe deemphasize combat in favour of other aspects as well. The narrative, too, is messy as it stands but could be cleaned up with some fairly minor rewriting.

Thanks for playing!

Whaaaat, that picture actually looked good to other people? I thought it was kinda bad XD

I only used stock music 3 times on three separate occasions (always when you encounter a new type of enemies or traps, as something of a gimmick but I can change it if you don't like it). Do note that the music used during the market and transformation scene were not stock, there were 'Freshing your EYE' by koosin486 and 'Rapid3' by PeriTune.

Yeah, I think the storytelling is pretty confusing, but I honestly don't know how to tie these scenes smoothly together. I'll try harder next time, though. Also, the intro and the prologue were supposed to take place in a completely different time, like months apart, but I guess I didn't make it clearer in the game. In the rooftop scene she was trying to get a better view of the sky but there were people blocking it.

That dungeon was taking place in the Argetrai with its inhabitants fighting you for reasons that will be revealed later. I guess I'll change the layout into some kind of a road that the Stoneguards were traveling on, so it'll serve more purpose than being just a dungeon. I think I'll add some notes that you can collect to read more about the lore as well. 

The tutorial images were blurry? That's weird, I thought it looked fine. I literally just press printscreen and use the image as it is without changing size, resolution, or anything. 

I think there were 2 technical limitations that you may be talking about, one is where you can get stuck in a wall during invulnerable frame and other where you can't use the teleportation after the first dungeon. The first was a legit technical limitation, but the second was something I could fix given enough time. Do note that it wasn't lampshading for fun, but as a guideline to the player so they'd know what to do in case they encounter these issues.

Yeah, I thought the frame where you're preparing your aim made it too slow during playtesting too. I think I'll remove that frame in the next version so the movement will be smoother. (Which is a shame since I spent some time making that frame, but it seems that it has to go) I'm actually planning to do a combat overhaul in the next arc of the game (not the next version, the next ARC) with WASD control and mouse to attack. And also maybe learn some JavaScript to create custom plugins for it.

The scene where they all died were....well, it's kind of a long story. Let's say I didn't know how to do stuff quite well while making the first dungeon, and that scene (and the other one a bit after that) was a demonstration of it. This problem was solved in the next dungeon, though. I think I'll remake the first dungeon to make it less janky.

Wow, your comment gave me a lot of ideas and feedback I desperately needed to improve my game. Thank you for taking the time to review!

(+1)

I did really like the picture. I don't know if it's actually good from a technical/artist point of view, but it's big, bold, colourful, and visually appealing.

The choices of music were good, and I couldn't really tell what was stock and what wasn't, so that's all good.

I kind of guessed that there was a timeskip involved and the two parts with the cat were supposed to be tied together, but it's not really clear. We need a better indication of how long the timeskip was and what happened in the meantime. Clearly there was some major cataclysmic event that we missed, but there's no indication of what that was, we just skip to the magical cat girl being exhibited as a curiosity for reasons that are not given. I think that scene really threw me; 

I think interleaving the Argetrai scenes was a mistake and they should have been grouped together, though this is somewhat subjective. In order to tie it into the rest of the story, it needs to be made clearer that this is some other dimension that slammed into the main one, or at the very least that this possibility exists, around the time it is introduced and not in an infodump later.

On that note there is certainly a risk of making the prologue too long and infodump-y. Arguably it's already at that point. A more crazy suggestion: do we really need to know the story of Argetrai right away, or can this come later? It might be better, it might be worse, but it's worth thinking about.

I should mention I briefly thought this was the idyllic kingdom we were just in, but I did figure out that it was something else entirely fairly quickly. This might be more of an issue for other players. I'd wait for more feedback on this one.

I would definitely prefer a road to a dungeon. I much prefer environments that are supposed to be something that serves a practical purpose. I think others who are more into dungeon crawls might disagree with me on this, though.

To be honest I'd just chalk up blurry tutorials to RPG Maker weirdness and leave it at that.

Are you planning to change up the combat mid-game? I'd recommend against that for a few reasons. One, it's really going to throw the player that combat is suddenly different, and they're going to ask why it does that. Two, the beginning of a game is very important for getting players hooked, and you want to put your best foot forward here.

Ah, glitches, the bane of every game jam game.

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You know what? That's a good idea. I'll remove all info dump about Argetrai in the prologue out and instead focus on introducing the characters and some backstories there instead. I think I'll put the story of Argetrai in after the first dungeon, where the player would have already gotten to play around for a bit first

This will probably have to wait until v.0.1.3 though since I want to focus more on character arts, presentation, and fixing up combat issues in v.0.1.2. Cutscenes also tend to take very long to create, and it seems like I have to create several new ones here.

No, I want to change the combat system in the next game (each game tells a story about one arc, this one is arc 3). We're going to stuck with this one for a while XD