I understand that the explanation in the beginning of the game is for those that didn't play Empty. A wall of text explaining the story isn't the best way to get this across in an interesting manner for the player. It's certainly effective, but it feels like you took the easy route. What I would recommend instead, is event come cut scenes that will play in the background while the explanation is playing. Sort of a "this is what happened in the last game" quick visual overview. Show a scene depicting Adrian figuring out that Reginald is his father for example. Show what happened to your first character, the courier. Just little details like that to give us a better sense as to what's going on. Especially with Adrian.
Speaking of Adrian. His introduction in this game is really...I don't have the words. He's outnumbered. How could he take down all the citizens, some of them trained warriors? It doesn't make sense honestly. I understand what you're going for, but it comes across as poorly thought out, flat, and cold. Give us something more to chew on at this part, instead of just a cut scene we watch. Let the player /play/ this, make them question /why/ Adrian is doing what he's doing.
When you get to the first town, you're confronted by what I'm assuming is your new villain, who proceeds to declare his villainy in a long-winded speech and then tosses himself at you. Again, I understand the point you're going for here, but an air of mystery I think would better serve this bit. Don't just toss your next villain at the player and go "AHA I'm the villain, bwahahaha. FIGHT OR DIE". Have them bump into you, knock you down, say something rude to you and walk off. This gives the player more of a wtf moment, and makes them curious of that NPC, dislike them and want to know a little bit more.
Then the very first house I happened to walk into, the guy immediately asks Adrian to run an errand for him. WHY? This guy doesn't know me at /all/. And I /just/ killed everyone, including my parents, in my old town. I'm a cold hearted bastard. Why is Adrian so nonchalantly being the errand boy at this point? Is that bit of information /really/ that pertinent at this point?
Wouldn't it be more interesting for the player to curiously explore the guys house, and stumble across that exchange?
Your mapping has improved only slightly, in this following section I'm going to point out some errors, and show you where the tiles are supposed to go, and give you some suggestions that may help with your mapping in the future.
First of all:
See the shelf outlined in red? That's a wall shelf. Not a floor shelf. The little bits sticking down below the shelf where the books are, indicate that those are the brackets that hold it on the wall. The next picture will show you where those shelves should go.
See how they're up on the wall? That's where those shelves should go.
The next thing with your mapping, is a lack of internal walls. Walls give more depth to a room, and give the players' eyes something to anchor and provide the appearance of depth in a 2D image. Without them, our eyes don't have anything to focus on, which really makes mapping errors stand out and hard to not notice.
I made this map just mimicking the one house from your game, see how it looks with walls?
There's several different mapping styles you can do, I'll show you an example here:
(see the original tutorial
http://rpgmaker.net/articles/620/ )
Play around with different styles, shift clicking tiles etc.
In the above map that you made, you also put a sofa right next to what would be the kitchen area. Use house layouts from real life as your inspiration. How often do you see sofa's in someone's kitchen? As it's unlikely, I recommend moving the sofa out of the kitchen area, and instead put a table and chairs where the inhabitants will sit to eat.
Next up is your little oasis:
The water tile you've used is from the overworld map set. You can see that the sand tile you've used as the ground doesn't match up with the sand from the water tile. Use the same water tile as you've already used for the little moat.
Your cliffs are very square and don't look natural or pleasing to the eye, try breaking up the straight lines a bit, and create varying heights of the cliff edges as well.
See how this person has staggered their cliffs? They don't have long straight expanses of cliff, they break them up a bit, use varying heights, and even use a different cliff ground type to create variation. Play around with the editor a bit and see what you can accomplish. (original thread here:
http://www.gdunlimited.net/forums/topic/11334-suikoden-ace/ )
Otherwise, I can see you're making improvements as you continue to work on games. Keep looking up tutorials and examples. Ask questions and browse help topics. Keep trying different things and don't be afraid to try something new, but don't be hard on yourself if you don't figure it out right away. Game development isn't easy, especially as a solo dev. I'd also recommend writing the script for your game into a wordpad document and having people read through it. With some critique your writing will improve. If you're not certain how to make your game so your player can play through the bits you normally having NPC's talking, try asking around on the forums. We're here to help you as best we can.
My biggest suggestion for you, is to try playing some other RM games, both completed and demo progress only. That's one of the best ways to see the many different things you can do with your games.
