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Seas of Novis notes from rangerdanger4tw (discord):

- I recommend adding a background instead of just a black screen on the title screen.

- XP clock UI thing is cool.

- Timing based minigame... ooof, I lack skill, haha. Not my thing, but cool mechanic.

- Very pretty tileset

- The magic animations are cool, very nice.

- If i try to use the mastery draught, but then cancel, it consumes the unit's turn.

- So this is just my oppinion on the timing minigames. For some players they will be easy, but for others (like me) they will be difficult to master. This means that if you balance around them, some people will perform poorly because they can't access some of the game's strategies reliably. It's a different skill set than strategy decision making. If this is intended and the type of game you want to make, awesome. Just be aware that this will be something to think about and if you think it will make some players less interested if they feel like they enjoy SRPGs but not timing/fighting game-like reflex skill mechanics.

- Taking damage on miss of a magic attack may be faithful to Gaiden, but I really hate that mechanic, ha.

- Fun first map, but took me 3 tries (the first was lack of understanding, the second death was just a boneheaded mistake)

-No bakcgrounds on the Celica/Mae convo on the boat?

-A great QoL feature would be to include the HP cost of magic in the battle forecast, if possible.

-3rd faction?! Very cool.

-I don't get forts as a healing mechanic.

-Enemy critical hits, lets talk about them. They are very strong, and random. When they happen to Celica, it's basically a guaranteed kill. Not sure how to play around it. It's just a "you lose this time" mechanic. Maybe give Celica higher luck? (If that's a thing.)

-In terms of balance, it sometimes seems like my margin for error is so small that if I miss more than one attack or get an unlucky crit, the run is ruined.

- I like that EXP is distributed to whole team at the end of the chapter. I don't have to feed kills to specific units to make them keep up. I can use everyone to their full potential for the situation that is called for without units being left behind.

-I couldn't get the ring in the second map without someone dying, so I left it alone. Beat it on try #3.

-Cool animated/story/cutscene event thing where they burn the ship down.

-Fun music.

-The writing is sufficiently good that I am interested in what they are doing. I always have a tough time with FE fan type stories because I think my own ideas of what characters are end up being slightly different than how others write them. Still fun all the same. More of a musing than a critique.

-Start of map 3, there's no way that I am going to be able to remember which houses the theives are going after. The info is fed to me really fast and I have a hard time keeping up.

-You give me an axe, say I probably don't need it and should just sell it. Why not just give me gold? Is it to make the payoff only accessible if I save the shop from being burned down?

-Is Kamui's skill bugged? Or if I double does it count as double the number of times I already will attack? (2 x number of bullseyes). I ask because I only got one of the extra pings in the minigame and I still hit 4 times, but I might have already been doubling.

-I can't beat missing three 80 to 95 hit chances in a row. Feels bad.

-Do you have a smooth scroll plugin or something? If it's publicly available, I would love to know about it. (When scrolling between units)

-What's teh point of resume game? Just to make sure you don't lose progress if it shuts down randomly?

- I almost beat the 3rd map, but ran out of time for the night and had to move on. Probably would have beat it on my 2nd or 3rd try like the first two maps. I can't help but feel that 50% of my deaths were due to bad play, and the other 50% due to just random bad hit rate/crit rate shenanigans. I don't have a lot of units, so it's hard to lose units to sopmething that isn't in my power. If I got a new unit every map I wouldn't worry about it as much, but right now it's like... if someone dies, it's a HUGE deal. Consider giving Celica a high luck stat to avoid map ending unlucky crits as much as possible (since she literally cannot die or else you lose).

-Overall a pretty satisfying experience. If I were looking to play a an FE fan game, I would definitely play the full game on release. The quality is sufficient and I assume it will only get better.

- Seems like the next step is deciding if you want to do more with the art direction. Black and white UI looks nice and clean, but is a little bland.

Fun game. Here is my very quick, spur of the moment, gut reaction commentary. Just use it as one perspective, not as a guide for what's absolutely good/bad about the game.

2nd Map, I could farm skeletons endlessly for XP by the end. Hiro and Axe Girl were both level 8. I really like this map. The switches were fun and kept me on my toes.

Did you mean for there to be 5 deployment slots on the 3rd map?

There is a lot of value in just putting all the XP into one unit because there are so many one tile wide choke points. So I can just level up one unit a lot and then have them tank the whole map. (Lord character, Hiro, finished the 3rd map at level 11. Only the boss could harm him.)

Consider putting in a terrain window. Does terrain matter? (UI)

4th map, would be cool if enemy was smary enough to destroy the wall.

Have reinforcements spawn at some point from the south? Or some other thing that makes me not just sit in the choke point. (In general, try to stay away from so many single tile hallways, the chokepoints are easily abused. It's ok for some maps (like the 2nd map, the underground skeleton map), but by the 4th map I felt like I could stick to my strategy of just use Hiro to tank everything in the middle and continue to increase in level.

Long sword has 2 range? I wasn't expecting that. Very nice twist.

I'm not sure how I feel about being unable to lose any character. In some ways it's a nice mechanic that adds challenge, in some other ways it's annoying that I can't let even a single person die 4 chapters into the game. The cavalier/caballero enemies are overtuned? I hit them with all four units and they couldn't kill one of them in a single turn (probably some misses), and then they proceeded to kill the Dona in one round. Feels bad to lose that way when she is level 7 and they are level 6. Maybe I just got unlucky here.

I am currently farming cavaliers to get all of my units very high level in the hallway. Reinforcement enemies should not give XP, or after the first round of them they shouldn't give XP or something.

The guardian moving to block the way is nice at the end there to defend the boss. I like the use of a variety of AI.

I beat the game. Hard to tell if it was properly tuned or not, because Hiro was level 14 by the end and basically soloed the top half of the map. (I abused reinforcements for XP farming.)

My spanish isn't good enough to comment on the writing. The story seems interesting though from what I can tell. (I used to speak spanish well, but I havn't practiced for about 12 years and so I'm super, super rusty, lol)

I like the 3 range spell, especially on enemies. It made me think. There were a few times that I could just sit outside someone's range though and hit them until they died and they wouldn't move. Perhaps that's intentional. Not sure if it's good or bad.

Overall, good job and I had fun. It wasn't groundbreaking but I had a good time playing, which is not always the case when playing my billionth SRPG game/demo. Nothing wowed me, but I wasn't bored either. Keep it up!

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Full disclosure, I don't have a ton of time to write a well thought out review, so this is more of just a stream of consciousnesses thought dump. Take it for what it is: just one first opinion of a first impression.

Typo in opening sentence of the opening story events, not a good look.

In general, I liked a lot of the UI changes you made.

Poor writing tbh. Story seems like a big weak point/afterthought. Not interesting at all, not funny to me. If you're going to spend time writing little quotes for all of the named enemies and allied units whenever they fight, it needs to be interesting. Otherwise it just takes up time and feels like a distraction. Is it supposed to be throwaway writing, or are you trying to write an engaging story?  You should pick either to write something interesting (with some humor sprinkled in) and get rid of the bad jokes (names like Fatty and Dorky Island tells me I shouldn't take the story seriously) or commit to full parody/satire. It feels like you're trying to do different things with your writing and it ends up just being that you do none of those things well.

You pirated awakening icons for skills it seems? For a small game probably not a big deal, but if you want to make it look more professional or ever release it as a full game, you will need to change that.

You need to finish translating it from Spanish to English. Seems like a work in progress, so I don't hold it against you since it's a game jam and we had only a few weeks.

The bandit portrait looks terrible, there is a clear white outline around it.

Sometimes when trying to check what a skill does the details window in the unit UI covers the Items and Skills and description at the bottom, and then I can't read it.

Poor translation/English is bothersome ("Even Marstu is winning me")

The movement abilities are all cool, keep those in for units (reposition, shove, etc.)

It's the first map, but it's hard to feel threatened when 3/4 of my army is barely hurt by enemy units. The second map seemed like there was a big power spike, I was careless and lost several units. That's probably on me, but just think about the jump in power/balance between maps 1 and 2.

Is the enemy archer Cameron recruitable in the first map? I couldn't figure out how to recruit him if so. If he's not, why name him? No story related thing happened, I had no reason to care about him. It just made me feel like I missed something. If I did, there wasn't really any hint as to how to recruit him or trigger a special event. Could just be me, but keep it in mind when designing for players.

Map design is pleasing to the eye imo. I think it's cool. I liked the way the map flowed for the most part. It's the first map, so it is what it is, but the best strategy is big ball of death, which gets old.

Holt just shows up doing 19 damage with 5 peg knights? Hmm.... All the other enemies up to this point were pretty weak. That was a big jump in damage and movement potential. I lost my archer and didn't realize. I could have avoided with better play though.

Burgh animation is really slow, which is a little annoying imo.

Jam promoted randomly when a voice started speaking to him... I don't know why. I don't like that I don't know why he promoted. I also have no idea what the different classes do, so picking wasn't really easy. I just picked swordsman, no idea if it was a good/bad choice, or even what kind of choice it was.

Overall, good UI.

"They kept a healer in a town hall" where is the town hall? Is that a recruitable unit? What does that mean? (event on first map at bottom house near boats)

So far I'm having an ok time, but there was a lot of dialogue I didn't care about between maps, and by the time the next map started... I just wasn't into it anymore, especially because it looked like it was going to be a slog with only a single end goal.

I liked the music on the first map. The song on the second map (player phase theme), I hate it. The trumpet sounds terrible. It's kind of busy and distracting. A good song for a power spike or story moment, something climactic, but if it plays the whole map I will go crazy.

Lots of empty space on the second map. I'm going to have several turns of moving through empty stuff in the top left corner. Once you get to the city, the map design is somewhat engaging. Why place someone by themselves in a deployment spot at the bottom of the map? Could be good or bad, I personally don't like it much. The mercenary recruitment idea is neat, hard to say if it's balanced or not because I didn't play with it enough.

Overall, combat is not too hard, but I do have to think. Sometimes certain units seems really OP, while others are steamroll-able. There aren't really side objectives, which can make maps feel linear (maybe happens in later maps?). I don't have a lot of reason to care about units because there isn't a lot of quality narrative going on. I don't feel invested in my units. It could just be early in the game though and if I played more that would change. This brings me to my biggest criticism. I feel like I'm playing fire emblem, but with a worse narrative. The map design isn't particularly challenging, but it's in a good spot where I had fun the first map. As I began the second map, I didn't really feel like I wanted to play it tbh. I just didn't see a why. I didn't care about the story or the characters, and while it was decent, the gameplay didn't suck me in to the point that I wanted to keep playing without a story or characters or side objectives that engaged me. Map design is visually pleasing with the use of the RTP assets. You did a good job on visuals for the most part with the RTP assets. Couldn't figure out how to recruit people (if recruiting was even a thing). Map design from a combat perspective was ok. Didn't excite, nor did it bother me.

Overall, good job finishing a game. There were moments of fun, but the game ultimately didn't really excite me. It seems like standard fire emblem with a few tweaks, and there isn't any one feature that really engages me or stands out. I left feeling very "meh, it was basically an FE game that was ok-ish". Keep polishing, and maybe consider how your game can be unique. Why would i play this over other FE games or SRPG games? What new experience does this bring? What thing about it is better that really sucks me in? So far, this question has not been answered.

Again, good job making the game. Much of this can be fixed with polish, hard work, and feedback.