HALI'S REVIEW THREAD (REQUEST YOUR GAME!)

Today's session of Touhou Fantasy was spent ranking up skills, because that's such a burdensome process that it takes an entire hour. Did I vouch for a custom menu system to handle this before? I can't remember.

I should have showed you what this looked like before I did my thing today, but here's what's left of my skill-tracking document:


I had to make one because the party is so huge and there are so many skills that checking them all manually is the biggest pain in the ass possible. A future iteration may become a spreadsheet because this is just ridiculous. For the record, I don't think I should have to make a tracking doc for any single-player experience, but when skills cost money to buy and you have no way of knowing which ones you already have at the shop screen, well...you do what you gotta do, I guess.

I understand why the system is the way it is now. The items call switches, which check to make sure the item you're using is available for use by the character who needs it. That way, lower-level spells are discarded and higher levels can't be learned early. It's form-fit into how 2k3 handles these things normally, but...the execution is atrocious. Like I said, you can't find out what spells you still need while you're on the shop screen. You also can't check which spells you have without putting those characters in the party and looking at them in the main menu. If you accidentally buy a spell twice, you'll be selling the extra for 50% of what you bought it for. If all this wasn't enough of a pain, all the items are sorted VERY far down the item list, so you have to scroll past all your medicine and armor to use them all one at a time (and there are dozens of them). Everything about this sucks.

I know custom menus are difficult to make, but it would solve all of this so elegantly. Give the player an item similar to HRCS that pulls up a special menu. Let it show all the characters, the skills they have, what they can still get; maybe even combine the functionality and let the player pick their party from there. It's so clunky as it currently is, almost any alternative would be better. You can control what's shown with switches and variables. Of that, I'm completely sure.

People were making fancy custom menus in RM2k3 a decade ago. If you ask for help around here, I'm sure you can find it. Personally, I'd recommend it first pull up a list of the available characters, and their level and attribute. When you select one, you can choose to look at/upgrade their skills, add/remove them from the party, or cancel to deselect them. There could be buttons for resetting the party and dequipping them. Since there are so many skills, a separate screen for each character would be handy. The nitty-gritty of it is just showing pictures and lots of 'if' cases. I wouldn't normally recommend something so complex, but I'm serious, the method you used is such a nuisance, it actively hurts the game's playability. On top of being helpful for the player, you wouldn't need all those spell switch items anymore, nor that clunky party swap hub, or even that speed fixing cameo of yours. If a joke game like Rezident Evil: It Is Escape could have functioning custom menus, you could, too.