Fallen Wings

After an extremely long haul, version 2.0 is finally ready to be submitted to the site! Here is a quick overview of the changes you will find, and the changes you won't find that some of you asked for. Note that while I tried to change as much as possible, there were some things that just weren't practical. In addition, I ran out of time/patience for the largest and most expected change.
What you will not see changed:
Unfortunately, for the various reasons I listed above, most of the maps in the game are still in their horrible, blocky, open state that makes it easy to wander aimlessly for a good 5 minutes at a time. It would have taken an extremely long time to fix all of the maps. However, I did pick out the worst maps, specifically the town maps, and try to fix them up a bit. Some towns, like Pendonia, got a complete makeover and are much easier to navigate. Others, like Edelrock, got a few trees added here and there to make the landscape more bearable. Either way, hopefully the lack of huge change won't affect gameplay too much.
The only other request I never got around to was adding more cheats to the game, and this one I feel less bad about. I feel like there were enough cheats to help people through the tricky parts of the game, and I felt like in general you guys agreed.

What you will see changed:
The battle system: I have adopted the side battle system that I used in other games, and the main idea here is that it won't lag. I got a few complaints about the lagging in the old battle system, and from my playthrough/test this has been entirely eliminated.
The party system: Instead of those horrible items to switch out party members, I have adopted a script to do it for you! All you do is select 'Party' in the menu, and edit your party however you'd like. (The active party now also trails behind you).
The battles themselves: What I'm personally most excited about, the battles are now balanced! The enemies have more health, but less defence. Now, instead of dealing 400 damage in the final battle and having it go painfully slow, you and the enemies will deal more damage faster. This keeps the battles exciting, and keeps you on your toes. In addition, with Artys' new skillset (outlined in another blog, and below) you have another aspect of battles to keep track of: Majors and Minors on the staff.
Artys' Skills: See the other blog made specifically for this purpose (There was just too much to explain in a small setting).
Aidan's Skills: Before, Aidan's skills followed a simple, predictable, stereotypical elemental path. Now, his writings fall into two catagories with 6 subcatagories. The Elemental path, similar to before, focuses on dealing damage to enemies. The subcatagories for spells are (and the bonus spell from the tablet): Tales of Fire and Ice (Blistering Prologue), Stormy Forshadowing (Storming Harbinger), and Words of Catastrophe (Catastrophic Connotation). The second path, the Spiritual Path, focuses on damage, as well as a variety of status conditions (Yes, not only the enemies, but now you have status spells too!). The subcatagories are: Mythic Fables (Legendary Allusion), Nature's Record (Natural Rhythm), and Haunting Stories (Shadowy Conclusion).In addition, remember those Loremaster and Druid classes that you could choose to adopt? And remember how they sucked? While they still are not as diverse as the Rune Sorcerer, these classes have remade skillsets as well to give players a greater say in how Aidan fights.
Scatto's Skills: While not a big change, Scatto has a few skills that affect enemy status conditions.
New Armor and Weapons: The damage on weapons was reworked to make physical characters on par with the revamped magical characters. In addition, each character was given several new pieces of armor and weapons hidden in the world, and Artys was given and entire set of accessories that affect her gameplay and spells.
Artys' Instruments: See the page on Artys changes for the complete details, but I will say that the instruments play a large role in deciding whether or not Artys is a healer or a fighter or something in between, and they are crucial for many boss fights.
New Music: Not a big deal, but nice to mention that lots of new original music from Newgrounds.com was added to the game.

Alright, that's it for the changes. The download will hopefully be up soon. If there are any bugs/mistakes that you find feel free to post them here. In addition, if there was anything I missed that you feel strongly about me including in the download, post it here! I'd love to here your opinions, and they might make it into the next version along with the bug fixes.