Lucadia

So I tried the demo, but didn't finish it. I was killed in the forest because of the poison the monsters use. The fact that I found no warning in the military camp, Solas, or the fishing place that there were poisonous monsters and that I should bring antidotes seemed like a big oversight. Not only that, you aren't really given enough money to start with. One guy tells you to buy healing items because the price is going up, but you can't really afford any (I could buy 4). And since neither of the characters have healing skills, it really cripples you in the forest. After dying I really didn't have the motivation to restart since I had gotten pretty far and wasn't in the mood to grind money in the forest to go buy healing items.


Here is what I liked:


The skills and crafting systems were good, though I found it annoying that on those pages you weren't told how many of what components you have, just that you simply didn't have enough to create something if you didn't meet the requirements. Unfortunately, the apple pie I made (and found) weren't enough to keep me alive!

The world map looks very nice. I know people aren't usually very big fans of random encounters, but on a world map of that size, it seems like a whole lot of walking for no reason without them. This is why games without random encounters on the world map usually have far more condensed maps (Chrono Trigger is the first game that springs to mind).


Now what I didn't like:


The interior maps of each place seemed like they were very bland. A bit too wide open and each one looked damn near identical. Throw a little variety into your interiors, it would help a lot.

Having to press enter a couple times each time I search in a barrel, pot, bookshelf, etc. gets really tedious. I think you should shorten up the display message or just not display anything at all unless the player finds something.

The lack of affordable healing items, or healing skills makes the game seem incredibly unbalanced. In addition to that, the poison seems to be way overpowered. I know that's kind of a problem with RM2k3, but you can at least tone it down a notch.

During the intro, you can access the menu. Whoops. Also, a personal gripe of mine during the intro... tint screen to black is your friend! It seems very amateurish when you transfer to another screen, it colors in normally, then immediately tints to another color. A useful tip: When you're going to do a transition to a new screen that will be tinted another color, tint the whole screen to black first, do the transfer, then tint the screen to whatever color it is that you want it to be. It looks much cleaner that way.

Your NPC's movements are really stiff. Specifically the guard that was chasing Celest. It just looked plain silly for him to move 100 MPH one square at a time. If you want them to move smoothly (and believe me, you WANT them to move smoothly), set their movement frequency higher, and adjust the speed accordingly. The frequency is how often they will move, if it's high enough, they will just continue to move in a direction without pausing.

You really should vary up the rate with which your pub patrons drink from their cups. It looked a little silly going in there and having them all drink in unison over and over again.

Graphical glitches, bugs, and other inconsistencies:


Racing Event - I did the little racing event, returned to the guy with two seconds to spare and watched those seconds tick away as I was slapping him in the face, only to have him tell me I failed. He's a lying sack of shit.

Morphing Sprites - If you go behind the counter in the pub and talk to the bartender, he changes color. In addition to this, if you search the jar in the fishing shack, it turns into a barrel.

Missing Music? - The world map didn't have any music, the fishing area didn't have any music, sometimes the music would just turn off in towns... really inconsistent.

Text Box - The guard in the lower part of the first area of Solas has a screwed up text box. In addition to that, the text box is inconsistent between NPCs. Some of them use the regular box, and some of them use the custom box with the small area for names. One or the other... polish matters.

Transfer Locations - When you leave the fishing shack it puts you way too far to the left, nowhere near where you entered.


So that's about it. Take some time and polish things up, make the interior maps less bland, balance out your combat and you'll have a decent game on your hands. Not bad for a first effort, though... I've seen waaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse.