I highly enjoyed playing this game, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, visceral little adventure.
First of all I'd like to say thanks for this really fun little game. I decided to give it a try after watching Indrah's review and I'm glad I did - thoroughly enjoyed playing through SE
and was really pretty impressed overall. I've only played through a few other contest games so far, but of those I have played, this was my favorite. I was really left wanting more.
I will, say, however, it felt more like a demo than a true game. By the rules of the contest, this is definitely a valid, full game - has a complete story arc, fully-implemented mechanics, etc. But in its feel, it was really more of a demo for your series, with only a single dungeon (that has a single theme), a few unvisitable areas, and (from a strictly gameplay sense) no ability to develop your characters. If you want your short game to show itself off even better, instead of just being a really intriguing 'demo', you should focus your efforts more precisely: think about which parts of it you want to fully build out, and which parts could be dropped. For example, you could have dropped the "look around for a partner" bit and developed your characters with more conventional narrative. For that matter, even though I loved the ensemble cast, you could have made a more effective standalone hour-long game by cutting the character list in half and giving each one more screen time.
Thoughts on Presentation
Most of the graphics were really nice. I liked the way the special dungeon and "around town" maps were laid out; clean and effective. I'm inclined to like the anime style and I thought the character portraits were beautiful. Character sprites were maybe not so beautiful. I did like the chibi-style monster sprites, but the supposedly scary ones needed to be more intimidating. I kept referring to the Forneus as 'cute Gyarados'. Voice clips were nice but in battle they need to be quicker.
The maps and backgrounds looked very sleek and high-res; the backgrounds almost look like they were designed in a "house designer" program. I liked the aesthetic a lot, I really did. But it conflicts with the dirty, ad-hoc kind of feel that you set for Garenia through the dialogue, so I was left slightly confused.
Control was too touchy. I often touched up/down lightly and the selection moved more than once, causing me to click something without meaning to. If you've evented the button commands, then add a longer Wait between cursor movement.
Thoughts on Narrative and Characters
I understand what Indrah was saying, but I personally really appreciate that you didn't go out of your way to immediately try to describe who the characters were or what they were doing. I got a sense for their personalities, motivations, and relationships just by finding side-scenes and reading their dialogue. It's an accomplishment that you could do this for such a large ensemble cast using about twenty total minutes of dialogue, so great job with that.
The characters were a bit cliche and I don't mind that a single bit because they were heartfelt, they were vivid, and they were diverse. Maybe it's my high tolerance for hamminess, but I thought the "find your own strength" motif worked well, and I felt emotionally invested in the characters, especially Priel and Perrine. You added in about the right amount of backstory (I would have liked a bit more as the scenario developed), and it helped me understand why each character is doing what they're doing.
I think there were a few odd word choices (such as Perrine using 'abide' when talking about her personality), but usually the diction and writing "voice" were very good.
Thoughts on the Battle System
It was, at once, ugly and beautiful, obscure and enlightening, broken and genius.
The core design of the system is very well thought-out. The useful "focus" skill, the constantly-in-flux EP meter, and the constantly-building EX meter all come together to ensure that each turn of a battle will be playing out a little differently, and that's the single most important thing in maintaining a player's interest in a battle system.
One thing that I loved was how de/buffs didn't take a turn to cast. Being able to use these otherwise-marginal skills in combination with attacks/spells/defense, as long as you have enough EP to do so, opens up so many more viable strategies to the player, and also helps you, as a designer, avoid the tricky art of balancing the value of buffs versus active skills. Adding a cooldown to these types of skills was also a smart move.
The EX Recover skill broke the system somewhat. I think the idea for the skill is good, but I was able to use it every two or three turns, which meant I rarely needed to make tough decisions about EP usage. Simply put, it makes battles too easy, and crowds out other cool EX skills. If I had my way, it would be reworked as a "super focus" of sorts - recovering more HP and EP (and maybe also preventing more damage) than a standard focus, but using your turn (as well as the EX points) to do so.
Besides that, balance felt just about right to me. Enemies could dump loads of damage onto you, but rarely one-shot the girls, so you have a chance to heal and protect your injured fighters. In a game with no revival items, having the KO state last only a few turns felt fair. And battles never plodded on, since you could take down most monsters in a couple turns and even bosses within half a dozen.
At least, they never plodded on unless I
wanted them to. See, because LF and EP carried over across battles, I'd often kill all the monsters except one, then use buffs, Focus, and EX Recover until my party was at full LF and EP before finishing off the last enemy. This wasn't particularly fun, but it was useful. What you might want to do is incorporate a mechanic to discourage or prevent players from "abusing" the system this way. A friend of mine at the RPG Maker Pavilion is using the best idea I've ever heard of to prevent this kind of thing: using a few variables to track whether the players and enemies are sustaining very little damage, and whether the player is using "abusable" skills like heals. If the variables get high enough, most non-boss enemies will sense that they can't win, and will flee from the battle.
I aired my complaints about the battle sprites earlier, but what I did like was that they were very animated. It was an immensely satisfying feeling to figure out a good strategy, and then start attack chains and watch the girls unload on a monster as I tapped the spacebar to say "keep attacking"! As much as the system is mostly well-designed, so too is the feel, and that's something that's often overlooked when designing RPG combat. Great job on that. I did experience the same lag that Traverse did, though. It was usually on the scale of about half a second between attack commands - enough to be very annoying, but thankfully not crippling.
The one drawback of your battle system was that parts of it were quite confusing. I understood everything you explained in the tutorial, I think. But some things went completely unexplained. Why were some weapon hits in a chain using different elements than the fifth and final attack? Was Perrine getting in multiple hits per button press in her chain, or did it just look that way? Why are the monsters attacking once sometimes and twice sometimes, and was that skill he just used on me physical or magical? What does Luck do for me in battle? These answers all seemed to be hidden behind some kind of obscure rules that, try as I might, I couldn't figure out.
Overall, though, I had a lot of fun with the battle system - strategic, visceral, and fun.
Thoughts on the Map Node System
This was a clever system that took a lot of the burden out of dungeoning and I feel it made good use of the extra "Travel Points" resource. There was a range of interesting things to find besides battles, such as traps and bonuses.
While I appreciated the existence of traps, I thought their implementation was a missed opportunity. It would be so cool if some of them let you, for example, play a minigame to control your own destiny, rather than choose evade and hope the RNG shows mercy.
A few other ideas for nodes you could add - completely optional (in the sense that avoiding them doesn't cost TP) battles against extra-strong monsters for some kind of permanent bonus to stats (or rare items, if you add items into your game), nodes that transport you to another node, or minor events that are simple character-building scenes (
EDIT: on a second run-through, that's exactly what these minor events were. Nice. But I still think those other gameplay extras would be nice in dungeons.).
The look and feel of this system was very good, aside from the aforementioned button-sensitivity issues. Overall, it was a winner, and I think a longer game could float on it just fine.
I think if you're going to make a full game with this system, you should take care to vary the gameplay between "dungeons" (like the Icefall Labyrinth) and "scripted events" with battles (like the Garenia arena). Either of these would get stale if you had to do it too frequently, but I think if they're interspersed between each other, along with a bit of exploration and the kind of character development scenes you've already got, it will be a great experience.
Overall Thoughts
I'm looking back and saying "whoa, I wrote a LOT!", but that's because I felt really invested in the game. It was fun, lighthearted, full of both strategy and energy... and also managed to slip a few heartfelt moments into the mix as well. There are a lot of little problems, the biggest ones probably being button hypersensitivity and combat confusion, but there are times where the action and emotion run high enough to make these little pockmarks simply disappear.
So while it felt like a demo, that demo left me desiring more Sacred Earth gameplay. I looked up
your dev blog, and I see a lot of information, but nowhere to download or buy any other games in this series. Are they all still in development, or what's the deal?
