The Winter Knight

The Winter Knight wasn't extraordinary in terms of the game itself, but I could tell you put a lot of effort into it, especially for a week-long project. I appreciated that.

Story - you state on the game page that you made it simple on purpose. Probably a good choice for an hour-long game. I went all out and just ended up confusing people. It was simple, it was all rather cliche, but it was alright. Not good, not bad, just alright. I felt like I'd seen it all before, from the childhood friend to the girl with the mysterious past to the overly-aggressive kid seeking revenge on the main villain. Even the Villain's response was predictable - I don't know if you've seen the Street Fighter movie but I thought of M. Bison's "For me, it was Tuesday" quote. Again, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything special. You made grammar errors, but English isn't your first language so that's forgivable.

Gameplay - Yanfly's battle script is certainly an improvement over the default, but I wouldn't call it innovative. In fact there were other entries in this contest that used it as well. You used your own unique skill system and gave the different classes different abilities from the normal ones, and your setup was better than the default, but it was still very similar to the common RPG setup we've all seen before. Just like the story, the gameplay was about average. Not bad, but not good enough to set your game apart from the others. The main problem wasn't the common battle setup though. I believe it's possible to set up great battles even with the default system. It was that all the battles were easy. Even the bosses. They had a few powerful attacks, but seemed to throw them out at random, and they were all easy to kill. The boss battles need some fine tuning to move the gameplay from "average" to "good." (Force the player to use strategy, put their skills to the test, make them realize just how strong the Demon King is.)

Graphics/Sound/Atmosphere - Here's where your game really stood out from the others. The gameplay and story may have been nothing special, but the world you created was awesome. From the moment I started in the beginning town I could tell you put a lot of effort into this project, just from the amount of detail put into the weather effects and mapping. Throughout the rest of the game, the mapping was excellent, the winter effects continued to look great, and the music added to the atmosphere quite well. The music at the ending scene also fit really well, coming to its climax at the same moment the dialogue did and really getting my attention.

FINAL VERDICT - All in all, despite the game being nothing special to play, it really was beautiful to look at. You are definitely skilled in the more "artsy" aspect of game design. If you had more time to write a good story and polish the battle system, I have no doubt you could make a very high quality game.