What an excellent game! This is one of my favourites of this jam that I've played so far, for sure!
I think this game represents a good response to some of the common downfalls of jam games - oftentimes they're very high concept, sometimes technical demos of projects that don't have the length to explore all the ways that their many mechanics intersect - but this game seems to dodge that minefield entirely by providing many of the mechanics that RPG Maker was exactly designed for, polishing it in certain places (instant text speed, varied movesets, on-screen encounters etc.) and fleshing the existing mechanics out by providing them a long-form bed to sit on.
The game is super fun, with gameplay and story zipping by at a cracking pace. The story is well-told, even if I did get confused at the amount of characters and subplots that were happening, I still enjoyed the effervescent nature of the dialogue that seemed to sparkle as I read it. There's very little long-term rumination or moody pauses - the game (after admittedly what I think might be a bit too big of a initial map portion with so many interactable NPCs before I've even started the actual gameplay action, but that's a minor gripe) just sets up an instant clarity of stakes and moves from there.
The dungeon crawling is swift, with reasons for victories/losses (both macro ("game overs") and micro ("inefficiency in battles")) easily portrayed through animations and the like, making me feel like I had a full understanding of what was going on in battles.
Moment-to-Moment Notes
I love the oodles of graphical style, cuteness, and monsters just jumping around and having cool movesets. It's all just fun. Even if the beginning was just a bit too long - I wanted to get right into gameplay, which is a lot more fun. There's some tutorial textdumps, which I didn't read because it was just too much information for me at the time, and most of it didn't need explaining except for the Skill Tree, which was unfortunately tucked away behind the "Skills" menu. I think that it should have been in the Main Menu, maybe replacing "Status", because I don't think I ever looked at "Status" once - most of that info was on the Main Menu screen anyway.
The "Overflow" skill is so COOL! I like the idea of when you attack, then the overflow attack damage gets multiplied to everyone else, which I used a lot initially, but became much harder to use later on in the game, for some reason, because I think I just killed most monsters in 1 or 2 hits anyway. This skill seemed to provide a major source of strategy to the early game.
Plus, I liked how you could see how much HP they had at any moment, so you can judge whether you should use the move or not. It was brilliant. I may have missed some of the other moves that were as genius as "Overflow", but it seemed to be the most original-feeling move in the moveset and I wish there were more like it. Indeed, later on, you'd get the dynamic where each monster was weak to a certain element, then you had to judge which "<Insert Element Here> All" spell you'd use, based on the individual enemies in the troop, but after that point, I did start using my favourite skill over and over again in the late game, and wasn't really punished for it. For me, it was Rowan's Berserker version of "Cleave", Alexander's "<Element> All" of whatever element they're generally weakest to, and Eva's "Shield Bash" unless a "Heal" is required. I didn't use much else after I had these skills, and I generally survived.
Since this isn't the type of RPG where you use "Guard" to regenerate MP or anything like that, there was a lot of using of items to regenerate MP. Thankfully, it didn't seem to fall into the trap where MP potions were too highly priced, and I always managed to get enough to be able to do interesting spells. Some games let you run out of MP fairly quickly and don't give you many ways to regenerate this, so you're stuck not being able to use interesting skills, but I'm glad this game didn't fall into that trap.
Oh, and with the tutorial text - telling me why a character is included, and what use their skills do and so on, is part of the fun of RPGs for me, so when I had that told to me, I didn't want to read it. I'd rather figure that stuff out for myself... it's part of the joy of figuring out "oh! this person heals this person and that person can buff. interesting!" that is one of the most fun aspects of RPGs to me.
But there were so many fun little things! I liked in the begining when you snacked on wedding food to recover, and when eyes appeared above things you can interact with (a neat user experience function!). I also liked "figuring out" that Berserker is just like Skill, but on a random target. Nice! That gives an extra layer of interest to the moveset.
There's lots of cute characters, and everything moves super quick to the beat of BANGER music. Seriously, the music is doing so much for this game. I loved the composition, I loved how it felt. It was really really well-composed music, and fit really well with the game, I felt.
I liked how the main character had a personality that's well-defined; even though we get to choose their gender and name at the beginning, it's not a blank slate. However, in the initial area, there was perhaps just a bit too much to interact with, I felt, and if I didn't know it was going to get interesting after the start, I might have not given it the full chance, because it does spend a lot of the initial part of the game putting story on you. I, however, liked the way the rest of the game was paced, interspersing the dialogue in amongst the gameplay in a really nice way.
I liked the backgrounds and the beautiful hero and enemy sprites and facesets. They are all gorgeous. I liked the tileset, and obviously the way it was used, which is a given since Indrah has always created fantastic maps. I liked how some of the enemies used potions to heal themselves - it was believable and cute. There was some funny joke told by a soldier about how stones are used as some sort of mobile phone technology... I thought that was kind of funny. Some battlers had incorrectly cropped sprite sets, which resulted in rows of horizontal and/or vertical pixels, but it wasn't a major because it didn't really spoil my fun too much. It was just noticeable, is all.
Statuses work well in this game. I understood almost every status that I got, despite them not having names next to them, and doing the "flashing" thing which usually means I don't actually understand how many statuses I have on me (lol). I'd much rather have status icons appear next to each other here, but it's a minor gripe.
In the first dungeon, I'll say it again - Splashback was so cool. I wish I saw more skills like that in other games, where the overflow becomes a stronger "Splashback" on all the other enemies. It's just really fun to try to control.
I attacked every monster encounter. Not sure if this was good or bad for me long term, but I guess it's indicative that I actually wanted to fight, which is good for an RPG.
Minor gripe - on-screen encounters could walk through followers, which exposed the "RPG Maker-ness" of it to me. I know this doesn't only happen in RPG Maker games, but it definitely happens in almost all RPG Maker games, so it exposed that to me. It's a difficult one to solve, but it was still noticeable.
There were other minor gripes - when you go through doors that span two tiles, it looks a little awkward because it looks like you're walking into the side pane of the door. When I rested, it triggered a cutscene, but I didn't really know whether I was supposed to rest at every single shop, and if I didn't would I miss a cutscene? I didn't get the memo, or if I did, my silly ADHD brain missed it. But either way, it did feel a bit weird to only trigger cutscenes (which are inherently "rewards" in my mind) when you "Rest", which isn't necessarily something that only good players do. In fact, some shops I didn't even Rest once.
I only "Rested" maybe 2-4 times in the game, 1-3 times in a single location (the final one) because of the difficult encounters near the end. But I think because of that, I missed out on vital cutscenes? I'm not sure.
One thing that was perhaps a bit of a weird point of this game - it is so easy to forget about the Skill Trees altogether, because it's so tucked away, but also because it doesn't alert you when you unlock the ability to have new Skills. I actually don't know why it didn't automatically unlock new Skills, because if you're activating a certain pathway, you're probably going to buy those skills anyway, so there's no real need to "choose" which ones you should have. I think it should just be an automatic "you learned <Skill>!" popup so you don't have to keep looking at the Skill Tree over and over. Plus, I would have liked it to alert me when I reached the maximum "experience points" reached (or whatever the term was to track the points unlocking the progression of Skills) and then urged me to change Skill Tree branches, because staying on the same one would probably do nothing, unless I was set on that one branch forever. Anyway, it was a great idea, and I think it could be improved with further iterations. As I said earlier, it should have probably been on the main menu as well, because it's likely one of the most accessed menus in the game.
I also wonder if it would have been good to disable "Berserk" skill type if there was only one enemy left? But I don't know... it just seems a little weird to allow the benefit of a "randomised attack" when there's only one enemy. But also, "Berserk" skill type can be applied to moves with a "random target" already, which I took to my advantage, meaning that it would just generally be a stronger move, you'd think. For example, a move like "attack twice at random targets for higher damage" is able to be executed in Berserker mode, which gives MORE damage based on the idea it's... randomising the target? Didn't quite make sense to me, but at least it gave me a bit of a battle edge ;P
The idea of Gigi's Emporium and the way it was portrayed was so, so cute. It's such a brilliant addition to the game, and the way it's fleshed out is one of the most delightful parts of the worldbuilding to me. The shopkeeper is such a cute character, and the trope is played against delightfully.
Also, when it came to distributing items in chests throughout the game, it just felt really well distributed. I seemed to come across the right chests at the right time for my level. It seemed to be a perfect balance, and then when I went to the shop, I seemed to have enough money to buy some of the things, but not ALL the things, which makes the item-buying process a GREAT test of my purchasing skills.
I also liked that the antagonists were also pretty cute and not super super antagonistic in tone, even if some of the things they did were debatably really awful. Their dialogue was a delight to hear.
Conclusion to my Super Long Review
All in all, I really loved this game. I thought it was one of the best games of this jam, and a good contender for my #1. At the moment, I have 3 games out of the 18 I've played that are vying for the #1 spot, but the other 2 cater to my tastes, whereas this one impressed me a lot despite not being in the style I'm usually infatuated with. Fomar said that both he and Indrah thought that this was their best game, and I think it might be my favourite game of theirs that I've played, too! It brings together their strengths in such a way that's cohesive and really solid from front to back. Something to be truly proud of.
Thank you so much for making this game and letting us play it. I truly enjoyed it, and it is a gift to the world.