I gotta say that I expected it to be an RPGMaker game but once i booted it up, I was surprised with how the game was in 3D. It reminded me of harvest moon for some reason. At any rate, I will say that it's very grindy (which isn't bad, people enjoy that) and the combat had a lot of love and effort behind it.
The music in this game is also a strong point of the game and it's so subtle that you don't even notice how fitting the music is until you realize you're humming the battle theme.
My main gripe about this is the lack of plot/character development. The story feels a flat in my opinion and there's not much going for the characters cause the interactions are very brief. Kent felt like a cookie cutter JRPG protagonist and Lain felt like a carbon copy of strong female lead other games have done before. This isn't necessarily a bad thing imo since archetypes have *always* been a thing and I can definitely see you fleshing out the characters in the final game but imo, what you have right now has been done before by so many JRPGs and I would love to see you do a different take instead. I firmly believe however that you can get away with the lack of interesting plot/not fleshing out your characters because of how the game is presented which imo is 5 stars.
TL:DR: Probably a favorite to win IGMC. Would definitely love to see more work on the plot and maybe difficulty options for those who don't want to grind. Good job!
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ooOOoo, thanks for the lengthy feedback! I'm really happy you enjoyed the game as much as you did. I was worried that some people would be turned off by some of the grind and did think about a difficulty setting, so when continuing this game it maybe something I decide to actually do.
I'm glad you liked the music, I wrote most of it myself (some new some reused from older projects), but there's a couple songs towards the end that are from the Smile Game Builder engine that found their way in there because I forgot to change them, oh well. They are noticeably different from the rest though. =P
Plot and Character development are always my weak point when I'm crunched for time, I'm glad you mention it though, because I always need a reminder to work on it more, hopefully I can bump heads with some of my more writing inclined friends and we can come up with some more unique devices and hooks for each character.
Thanks for playing! I'm more than happy to be considered a favorite.