FALLEN-GRIEVER'S REVIEW THREAD

Look, Griever's reviews aren't nice and helpful but neither are they obligated to be. One thing I learned the hardest way possible is that this community does not and never has give shit one about constructive criticism, fairness, or balancing negative criticism with praise in equal measures. No one is going to cradle your scrotum while gently massaging your balls here.

At the same time, I can't say that Griever's review of Aftermath is fair or unfair because I haven't played Aftermath, although I've been meaning to! Almost all of Griever's reviews (except the ones for Dungeon Crawl and Backstage) have seemed a little harsh to me (although Griever later retconned it, he gave one of my games a 4/10 for Story, which was shocking!) but then again, he is allowed to be as harsh as he wants to! If he is indeed "too harsh" (which he's skirting, but not quite there) that will correct itself because people will just stop respecting his reviews or taking them seriously.

In short, the reviewer is in general allowed to be an asshole, and you are not, because hey he is kind of doing you a favor by reviewing your game at all. And ultimately, unless there is a massive paradigm shift where the community turns SANE over night and suddenly people realize that in fact it is the game makers that are doing everyone a huge favor by making the games and they should have their balls cradled and their scrotums gently massaged, that is how it will remain.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is far better that you are writing reviews than not. I think it's a service to the community and you should keep doing it.

I'm just saying you could afford to be a little more...sensitive? But you are NOT obligated to. Understand?

Fallen Greiver's reviews have been supremely helpful; for me at least. Take from them what you will; just remember that you asked for his opinion; and he is going to give it to you.

The lack of direction is the #1 thing nearly every player complained about when playing Vanity, specifically finding the second dungeon, so thank you for pointing this out. For the full game I'm going to place colored arrows that will lead you to where you need to go (it's also the exact reason I started doing them for Mystery Man). I haven't put out a new version yet because the game itself is like 60& complete, so there kinda isn't a point... But this is an issue that have been addressed.

I will have a "faq sheet" about the elements for the full release as well.

I feel that Vanity has a good cast of characters that are sometimes let down by a narrative that, at times, is rushed.

I'm actually somewhat surprised no one else mentioned this, because it was definitely a concern of mine. When I first started Vanity, it was more or a glorified Shin Megami Tensei fan game of the SNES era, and they're writing was very..."here are the facts, here's the problem, deal with it." The characters didn't really have personalities that "popped" so to speak. It wasn't a very character driven RPG at all. The plot mainly centered around your actions of the consequences of said actions (and loads of other stuff, but that's a-whole-nother topic).

In the full game, after the demo scenes, you do get to see a lot more of the characters personalities. They speak a lot more, the narratives aren't as frequent, and the scenes are longer. They're much better developed, obviously. What the demo did was more or less introduce the characters, to give the player a feel of who these are and what goals they may have. The full game is going to expand on these, and depending on what you do, some of them could become your best allies, or your biggest enemies (or some of them could end up dead--it's all in what you did!).

And lastly, the graphical style was deffo a choice. I knew it could've potentially been an issue for certain players, but I didn't care, I still wanted to do it. I played a game that had an identical look, and I loved it so much that I wanted to see if I could do my own (here is a youtube video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIyzOrvuS2A -- yes, I have weird taste!). I knew it was going to put off some people, but I didn't want to the exact same game that everyone else was making. It would've been easier to make a game like those for easy popularity, but I don't find them interesting to play. I wanted to do my own thing, and I like the way Vanity looks, so I'm okay with it. Not many people seem to mind at all, so I guess it wasn't going to be as big of an issue I originally thought it was going to be.

At the very least, I make sure that all of the backgrounds in 3D (anime-like backgrounds are ridiculously hard to find...and using real life backgrounds wouldn't look so hot--I have standards a little bit).

Thank you for the review, though. I thought it was great.

Well, since you asked...



Would you mind reviewing this?

http://www.rpgmaker.net/forums/index.php?topic=2909.0

It's about an hour long. Not sure what your stance is on "comedy" games. This isn't OMGLOL funny, but it's lighter than Vanity.

Thank you! I may put up an updated demo once I've completed a good amount. I mainly put this one out to see whether or not I was, at least, "on" to something decent.

Also, I would suggest implementing a detection system for the enemies, as having them set to walk towards the hero is very overdone, tripe and boring.

I think I'm going to steal from Wild Arms 2 and make it your choice whether to fight an enemy or not before entering each battle.