I was onboard with the game until it hit the first town, where the pace slowed down considerably, worse, I got stuck and unable to progress: after the cutscene where I talk to the lady and she tells me to meet again, I left the building and I could not come back in or leave nor do anything else.
Overall I felt like this had some merits, especially the care to detail in some areas, but it definitely had some letdowns.
- The title screen, while cool in concept, lagged horribly.
- The video at the intro was nice, if it was made custom, that's impressive.
- Getting experience from exploring is a neat concept. personally I think the exp was on the high side, and every single interaction including chests felt a bit overkill. I think getting exp from the more "important" bits (backstory, lore, etc) would be better, but that's just me.
- The dialog pace (not the text, the actual display) felt slow and clunky, the lack of a skip feature really made accidentally talking to npcs twice a chore. I'd suggest giving the option of having instant or fast text.
- On the dialog again: if you're going to make use out of waits in the text bubble or a lot of long names, I'd suggest using a regular textbox: dialog bubbles work best when kept trimmed and snappy.
- The mapping is fairly rough, which felt strange because other areas of the presentation felt like they had some amount of care in them. It was tolerable, but definitely noticeable.
- The little details of footsteps sounds and footprints were a nice touch.
- The sprites/combat battlers did not really match the faceset in the menu, which makes me wonder if this was custom art or an assembly of assets: either way, the menu faces were a bit of an odd choice to me.
- The combat assets and elements felt weirdly small and lost in the big resolution screen, especially the hud with actor hp/mp/tp.
- While I enjoyed having "active" aspects to the skills and attacks, it would have been best explained, as the game never told me what was the corrector "action" to take was, should I press the Blade bar as soon or as late as possible? No idea.
- The lack of things to do in combat, at least in the first area, aside of the "big boom" and "attack" was a bit boring, especially in the longer fight against the dark figure.