Hi. Kept meaning to try this game for some time now and got a bit of feedback. I know that the game is complete and you'll probably not be adding any more changes, but if my suggestions can at least help you out in your next project, then I've done my job. Also I apologise in advance if a lot of the feedback sounds negative. I'm just giving my honest opinion.
Firstly, in regard to your opening post, I'd personally recommend you not to slag off other creative works in your game description. It's very unprofessional. So my suggestion is to remove that bit about the one-winged angel, but it's all up to you.
Anyways, on to the game.
The intro was a bit of an info dump. It just started talking about the backstory and all that, which should really be saved for later and introduced in more interesting ways. Showing rather than telling is much more engaging. Also, for an intro like that where you can't skip each text box, it would've been nice to make the whole thing skippable, at least for those players who decide to replay the game.
I could tell right away that you've put a lot of work into the visuals. Visually the game does look stunning. The mapping is great and the menu look and the icons are very nice-looking as well. However, I found the text size to be a bit too small. Or maybe it was the font. But in general it was a bit painful to read it.
There are a lot of locations accessible at the start. I see a lot of towns and villages and too many NPCs to talk to. I personally found the game to be painfully slow at the start. There was not enough action and no story hook at all. Like the first 40 minutes I was just walking around the entire continent and looking first for the church and second for the pub, which brings me to another point. The quest journal doesn't make anything clear at all. I didn't even know the Dirty Dog was a pub, since it never mentioned it. It could've been any place in any town. The third quest says for us to meet a stranger in 'that' storage room. I was confused there since it didn't specify which storage room. Luckily it was within the same town, otherwise I would've spent ages looking for it. My personal suggestion is to make instructions in the quest journal clearer, especially for a semi-open world game like this.
As I mentioned above, there wasn't really any story hook at the start, and all the characters felt quite one-dimensional. They all speak as though they're reading lines off from a script and so the dialogue doesn't really sound natural. I really couldn't relate myself to the plot or to the main character. The only emotion she ever shows is angst, which starts to get annoying after some time.
The music is very nice. I'd say I enjoyed every track I've heard so far. They really do provide some nice atmosphere. Was the music custom-made for the game or was it from royalty-free sites?
Now onto the battles and game mechanics.
I noticed in some of the earlier posts people were saying that battles were very difficult. I am guessing you must've lowered the difficulty since then, so kudos on that. I found the combat to be balanced fine in terms of difficulty. The battle animations were kind of slow. It would've been nice to have them go by a bit faster. One thing that annoyed me about the battles is how random the weaknesses and resistances of enemies were. Like why is the common forest wasp immune to fire? Or mushrooms that are immune to fire and cold? They just didn't make any logical sense. And when I check the resistances in the enemy info, I am greeted by some confusing icons with no explanation as to what they mean. What does the yellow icon mean, what of red and blue? It was only much later I realised that red must be the weaknesses, and I am still not sure.
The MP of both characters is way too low. I run out of it after every battle and there are too few restorative items, each of which restores very little amount. I ended up using basic Attack as Laine most of the time, because I couldn't afford to use my skills, and because it was less of a gamble as far as enemy resistances were concerned.
Also, is there any way to undo the assigned points when upgrading my characters' attributes? I noticed as soon as I put in a point, it gets set in stone and I can't remove it in case I made a mistake.
That's about it. I played for about 2 hours. The game is not bad. At the very least it's quite polished and I didn't come across any major bugs, but it didn't really jump at me. Visuals and music were good points. Combat was average. And story and characters weren't interesting at all. I might play some more of the game, just to see more pretty maps and listen to the in-game music, but I really couldn't get into the story at all.
Fixes a couple of small bugs that have been reported, and it's a sum total of 1.6 MB.
