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Good ideas, very condensed.

This game had a bunch of interesting concepts thrown in, but they were all available for such a short time that I don't think the player has a chance to fully appreciate them.

STORY:
Immediately after returning from their heroic quest to defeat the Lich, three heroes known as "Gem Hunters" are sent after a demon in lieu of being rewarded. They soon learn that the demon has a way to control others, and after some brief (very brief) character interaction they put a stop to his evil plans. There were one or two decent jokes that were worth a chuckle, but a lack of character or plot development and a few errors with window boundaries and name references (Who is "\" and why must we protect them?!) dragged the narrative down. The ending was alright though. Ahh the curse of the silent protagonist.

GAMEPLAY:
Quite a few promising ideas were thrown in. The .hack style "combine three symbols and it will act as a portal to the corresponding world" thing was neat, but you only sent us to three different worlds, and the random generation made them appear lazily mapped. Also it wasn't like the player has to remember or figure out the runes, they're just given to you, and then the proper combination is in a notebook right next to the portal. I just ran off in the middle of writing this to check if putting a completely wrong combination in did anything... but it just sent me to the same randomly generated map as the final boss, where I fought a griffon and didn't even get any comic relief out of it. Props for including a contingency for stubborn idiots like me who will definitely try something like that, but somebody could have at least made a comment on the fact that I intentionally screwed up and teleported us to the middle of nowhere.

Next up, the fighting system. The game does not use any sort of experience, and spells take no mana, so essentially there's very little cost/reward for fighting vs. escaping. Instead, you have the opportunity to get some gold and buy more gems after fights. You can warp back to the castle at any time to facilitate this, and in theory it's a great idea. The game doesn't feel grindy and the battles don't feel like a chore because there's no pressure to reach a certain level by a certain point. Gems power up or alter your characters skills, and have cooldowns rather than being consumable items. However the battles ended up falling flat in my eyes - because Gloria's heal spell could be used forever and ever, I really didn't even have to use gems at all. When I did use them, it didn't feel like they were really doing much for me. Since the game was named "Gem Hunters," I was expecting that at the very least there would be a way to find better gems that had a more significant effect on the outcome of battle. With the battles too easy to require the gems, and the purchasable gems not powerful enough to noticeably alter the flow of battle, the whole idea ended up falling short. There should have been treasure chests I could find with more powerful gems in them, and maybe I'm just being masochistic here but the last boss battle should have required either a) better gem management than "I'm going to spam everything but the multi-target gem" or b) acquisition of something better than the default gems.

There was also an issue where Aluxes just stopped doing anything. Like right in the middle of the last boss fight, he stopped acting on commands, or at least his animations stopped playing. I think this was directly related to the similar glitch where he started off the turn already having the gem window open as though he had selected a skill.

Again, both the rune-word system and the gem battle system had a lot of potential, and in a longer game where you have to learn combinations and hunt down better gems I can see something great being put together. But without either of them adding much challenge or depth to the game, they were just kinda there.

GRAPHICS:
And here's where the fact that you had help becomes abundantly clear. Those little custom drawn sprites for everything. Well done. So many sketches in so little time. Having original art in an RPGMaker game instantly sets it apart from those of us who are too lazy/unskilled/busy to make our own resources. Especially in a contest environment where everybody has seen the same sprites walking around the same tiles and fighting the same enemies with slightly different reasons for hours. One complaint though - the characters blocked their health totals somewhat.

SOUND:
Well I don't think I'd heard those tracks yet. But now I've heard all 4 of them a whole bunch of times. While I really liked the opening/credit theme, the overworld and battle themes got stale quickly, partly because they were short and you could tell where the loop restarted. I didn't really notice much in the way of sound effects.

ATMOSPHERE:
More props for the themes, even if all but the intro/outro one got old they were well selected to fit the atmosphere you seemed to be going for. However the rest of the game felt empty somehow. There was the castle, and then there was a barren desert and some barren fields. With pegasuses. Pegasi? Flying unicorns. The world just needed some more lore, or at least some more people.

FINAL VERDICT:
It's hard for me to give this game a low score, because I thought you had great ideas and I was impressed by the art. And for that the game does get some credit. But there just wasn't much substance beneath the pretty exterior. I'd like to see a fully fleshed-out, more than a couple days development version in the future!

Posts

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Thanks for the review, sadly I can only take credit for the title screen, most of the art is from Etolier.

I've done a bit of work on the game since the contest ended, I have looping maps now. I was literally implementing the gem system about 2 hours before handing in so I didn't manage to implement many gems.

When I finish my current project with Indrah then I do intend to spend some more time polishing this and hopefully will re-release it.
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