I was able to add back in the QTE magic system and lockpickable chests! I figured it out! Details below:

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When I first released this game, I had a two systems that I really liked. One was an evented lockpicking system that was loosely based on one from Skyrim (or so I'm told. I'm the one person on earth who hasn't played it yet). The other system was a QTE system attached to my magic skills.

I always thought the lockpicking minigame was pretty clever and it made slightly more sense for there to be a bunch of locked chests around the world as opposed to unlocked chests with a bunch of gold or cool armor in them.

I was really proud of the QTE magic system because I thought it worked well with the story. QTE systems can be annoying and overly challenging, which I can appreciate. But I wanted to show that the children in the game were challenged by their magic power and that, while powerful, maybe it wasn't something to use in every battle if they didn't need to. By attaching the QTE system to only their magic skills (and not other weapon skills), I thought it made a nice balance that worked well with the story, characters, and theme; "Ludonarrative consonance," as they say.

But... those systems didn't work. I had script conflict issues and constant crashes. It was enraging and embarrassing, mostly because the script conflict was intermittent and did not show up in my testing (long story short: The script conflict would happen after consistent play, usually 30+ minutes. During testing, I was regularly resetting and rebooting or otherwise not playing 30 minutes straight) and I released a buggy mess.

So I dropped them. The chests became unlocked and the magic system was just: Click. Magic. Done.

It bugged me that I was beaten by this problem. But I moved on to other things.

Months passed and I was clicking around online when I saw a recent video of a QTE system in a battle by Clockwarkgate, made in VXAce, that was similar to what I had but just different enough that I could tell that it wasn't based on the script that conflicted in my game. How did this person do this? So I PM'ed him and it was all evented! And then he walked me through it a little and everything fell into place. Brilliant - no script conflicts! Why didn't I think of this?!

So as I went back to the drawing board, creating an evented QTE system in my battle based on Clockwarkgate's message to me. And then I realized why my treasure chests were broken! Everything was coming into place!

So now they are back! I have updated the game and have added back these two systems, finally achieving my original vision for the game. Now I can truly rest.