Preface by saying I've never been a fan of this particular graphic style, but it was made much worse by the rather clunky way users mapped with the tile packs. Here as it is all parallaxed quite well that was much less of an issue. Not my style, but not bad.
To make things worse, this game is not my type
I'm largely a nerd for characters over gameplay, and high "serious" fantasy tied up in politics is outside my interest
So it was a pretty bad combo to come at me, is what I'm saying.
Game, for what it was (I assume) TRYING to be, was perfectly fine. I ran into no glitches. I did't hate or love the game, and if this WAS my sort of game i'd have probably enjoyed it a lot.
A few of the things I CAN be objective on feedback is some of the design choices (or the engine defaults) that got in the way or that I liked. Just take it as a list of things than could be improved to smooth out aspects of the game, maybe ><
- Having a big especilized rooster is nice, but having the main character take up a slot by force is annoying (and he didn't feel all that good in any aspect, which made it all the more frustrating).
- Having few skills to choose from right in the menu is cool, but since everyone's default attack is another skill, why not give them custom names? I could not keep up with whose attack did what at all.
- Not having icons visible on the battle menu got confusing. In the general menu are there and serve their purpose: to tell me at a glance if it's a regular attack/buff/heal etc. Not having it at the battle menu coupled with so many characters just meant I had to highlight each one to revise what each was every time.
- The parallaxed mapping was pretty good. I'm not a parallaxer so I can't tell to what degree what's custom or not, but they were effective and expansive with only a few crinks in towns around the edges or objects.
- While I understand the point of the game was to synergize party members, and I was not in any way playing in a big strategic way, it felt like a lot of skills relied on exploiting states that were more or less unique to 1-2 characters, and there is no way I can remember who has what, especially since...
- The characters just blur together since they don't have a big presence. The only ones I could recognize quickly were the AOE attackers, and that was simply because they make fights go faster (and I'm a non-strategic idiot).
- Having a small blurb of some kind when describing characters (such as a bio profile in the menu) with a small summary of wat the character does would work wonders.
- The cooldowns are rather overdone. Since the characters have 3 active skills tops and outside their regular attacks all of them seem to have usually 4 turn cooldowns, it means theres no real strategy ivolved. No Mp, long cooldowns, it all boils down to using what I have available, since there's no choosing and all other skills will be in cooldown anyway. I'd either reduce cooldowns or replace them with a MP+lesser cooldown system. Even better, I'd recommend weeding and merging some characters, because some, like the tank lady, did not feel like they were worth a slot even as their role.
- The high numbers are very hard to gauge. It's a nitpick, but it's hard to tell at a glance if the number is high or low when it's all in the thousands. Lowering it to be around the hundreds would help a lot. Same with the actor stats. They're all so high and no one goes below 300 in anything, it's difficult to know who's actually got high stats. Deflating them a bit would be nice.
- If the game gets a face-lift I'd suggest going over the icons. They don't mesh well with the game's graphic style and in the menu everything is made huge and pixellated.
- I could somewhat follow the story (which is nice, I'm a dumb idiot when it comes to political inclined plots) and there were nice moments here and there, but overall the game could do with less stiff moments and more of the prolog, or when the bad guy is talking about the customs of his people. The rest of the game felt very impersonal and the characters felt like they barely were there. I know it's not the point of the game, but maybe they could get a tad more involved? At least the main character. I had absolutely no opinion of him or knew anything about him.
Man this is such a grillfest. I'M SORRY THIS JUST ISNT FOR ME
It's a well done entry on it's own but it's mismatched on me OTL
Video evidence:
