The Tiamat Sacrament

comment=36133
I'd love to see a LP of TS, would be great for insight about how an average player deals with the game.

PM me for tips on Knoas fight if you're still struggling with it.

I'll start work on the LP next week, seeing as I'm going out of town. Thanks for the offer for help, but I'll just grind level my way past him. Maybe, if you tweak the game a bit, add a few wind enemies before Knoas so it can give you a few helpful runes in his fight. Once again: AMAZING game.

In the 1st strategy board game, if hero encounters a squad, the fight often ends automatically before foes cleared, but CP is still rewarded. That's not bad at all. But after the strategy board game, random encounter fights sometimes end automatically, too, with no EXP rewarded. That's a problem. Has anyone else encountered this bug?

I feel dumb now, but I'm stuck in borderlands on trying to find the Duke's package. If the puzzle's something to do with the sign it's truly stumped me. I'll probably hit max level fighting borderlands enemies before I find out how to proceed on =(

Edit: I absolutely give up >_< will you tell me how to get past that quest

I found a bug (I think it's universal in RPG maker 2003). If you die and you have a item that auto equips haste and you revive the person, the ATB will not fill.

Oh gosh. I saw that cave the FIRST time I went through borderlands, but I never saw it again despite walking around in TestPlay mode. Creepy subconscious trying to protect me from mindless gaming!!!

Edit: Found more bugs. The Cleanse Body skill doesn't seem to learn probably. My Xandra has got to 200% learnt but it still won't be learnt!

Another annoying bug is sometimes the UP key seems to be stuck or something - and you can't press up in menus, and in the map you keep walking upwards. Hitting certain keys on the keyboard seem to solve that or something, I'm not sure how. But it seems potentially game breaking...

Edit: Sanctuaries are completely useless for me. I always accidentally use the one I have on hand because of the stupid popup message. :/

Edit: More bugs. At the ending Kelburn says he killed Ryjin while the other two just watched. He wasn't lying <_< A bug occured and I was able to strike 12 times in a round with Gyle's rune sword, so Azuar and Xandra were basically just focusing and giving haste/rage to Kelburn who did all the damage. Obviously... a bug with sacrifice.

Other bugs include - Azuar's model is bugged after the beam avoiding minigame. He permanently faces south. Also when Ryjin destroys your soul gems... it actually doesn;t seem like it because the game still shows you progressing towards the learning of the skills of the one you still have equipped! In the battle where you're trying to lure Gyle, an enemy agent took over one of my troops in a particular spot and then stopped moving, trapping Gyle who just moved back and forth. Fortunately... I still had leftover troops to make the blocking troop move by getting it to attack into another spot. Another bug is that Mithril equipment never appeared in the shops although Kaen said they were going to be there.

The later skills of Xandra take a little too long to learn via observe even with the relevant hat...

Edit: Oh wait.. There's postgame. And mithril equipment have appeared :D

can u tell me how you did the Soul Gem Ability learning thing?

This game would look uberlicious if you remade it with vx, graphics look inferior to 2k

ps: I spent 4,5 hours in wow trying to fish a sewer rat, which let to a inventory with around 2k fish and me quitting the game saying wtf am I doing with my lfe <.<

*apologizes for necroposting*

Since I feel nervous about making a full-fledged review since I don't have much practice with them and they always seem to fall short compared to everyone else's, I'll make a mini-review here of what I liked and disliked about this game:

Overall, it was pretty good. The "body" of the game (presentation, gameplay, etc.) worked pretty well. As always, the random encounters made me froth at the mouth, but they're easy to use so I can understand why you used them, and since combat is pretty interesting it was mostly excusable. One thing I did dislike, though: While the puzzles were mostly brilliant and good ways to break up monotonous dungeon slogging, there is nothing more infuriating than random encounters while you are trying to do a puzzle. It's pretty hard to avoid with the way you set puzzles up, but I would advise working around that in your later projects. Also, I had a lot of trouble on the lava and rock puzzles in the volcano dungeon. It's extremely hard to get the timing right there. I would recommend against making timing-specific puzzles like that unless there are easier ways to do it.

I agree with Solitayre that there are many good additional elements to the basic 2k3 battle system, and we eventually get tons of skills to control many situations, which is always great fun in these kinds of games. I won't reiterate what other reviews have said, though I will say that the game has a rather noticeable inverse difficulty curve. This is probably because one of your few party members is a blue mage, who always have that, but it's rather extreme since she's totally useless at the beginning and for a while after that, but once you start learning the elemental skills she turns into a complete and utter gamebreaker. Then she learns non-elemental and healing skills too, and you wonder why you need anyone other than Xandra (the answer is to cast buff spells on Xandra and take hits for her). Oh, and you know what else is a total gamebreaker? Gilded Wing. Az'uar's other buff spells are obviously extremely useful as well, but Agility is the god stat in RM2k3. For a mere 32 MP (which you will be swimming in end-game), you can get six turns to an enemy's one unless they're a dual boss or something. Combine that with Xandra's aforementioned gamebreakiness, and nothing can really challenge you anymore. Oddly, I never got much use out Kelburn. His Rune Blade skills are more effective against bosses than Az'uar's breath attacks, but other than that he's just outclassed. Az'uar has better stats and tons of buff and heal spells, and, as mentioned earlier, Xandra is an omnipotent goddess.

Because of the above, the final boss was pathetic. Due to me buffing my party to godhood (*cough*Gilded Wing*cough*), he barely attacked at all in his first form, and literally did nothing except resurrect his "spawn" in his second form because Xandra just kept oneshotting it. I think that battle would work much, much better if you just didn't have the spawn at all so he wouldn't be tied up trying to resurrect it every turn.

The Strategy Board was a nice feature. I like it when some games dip their toes into another genre to mix things up a bit as long as it's done well. The only problem I had was that it's sometimes hard to reach all the events before the battle ends, which is rather disappointing to me since I'm a completist who wants to get everything. D: Oh well.

Oh, and I noticed that you opted for the route of making Xandra's sealing technique work purely by random chance. Forcing players to rely on the Random Number God for such an important gameplay mechanic is a terrible, terrible idea. Rune Seal is a total waste of MP until you're halfway-ish through the game. I think a better idea may have been to give it a 100% success rate, and have better brushes decrease the necessary threshold for when monsters can be sealed. However, this is just one blemish on an otherwise excellent game, and, like everything else really, it fixes itself during the endgame. At least you had the foresight to include the fishing minigame, that is indeed quite helpful.

I loved the music. I'm a very musical person and consider it a very important part of a game, and the music for this was quite fitting. The boss battle music was very good in particular. The only thing I might recommend would be additional boss themes for "climax bosses" or some sort.

I don't know much about mapping/level design but other people say it's pretty good so I guess I'll go with what they say! The Borderlands was incredibly confusing and rather overbig, though. I had to look at the map in the editor to figure out where I was supposed to go.

I won't comment on the graphics because graphics are the least important aspect of the game and it's silly to judge a game by them (WolfCoder said it best, above). I was kind of disappointed by the lack of character portraits, but you made up for it by making the sprites themselves expressive. On to the story:

Again, pretty good. The characters were consistent and pretty well-written (though the dialogue did feel kind of stilted at some points). Xandra's character development was painfully cliche, though. The plot itself was a little cliche but did have some interesting spins on it, particularly the idea of dragons' Blood Memory and other little worldbuilding tidbits. I consider worldbuilding to be the most important part of storytelling, so in my book The Tiamat Sacrament did rather well. The whole "evil empire is being evil, join the rebels and overthrow them" is also very cliche but I felt that discovering the secrets of Az'uar's past and the world's culture were the main point of the narrative anyway.

Oh, and the climactic battle with Gyle was epic. It was also one of the few battles I found really, really hard. Excellent job there.

After Gyle though, it kind of falls apart... I felt the story took a bit of a decline during the final dungeon. The abrupt switch from fantasy to sci-fi is extremely jarring and didn't really work, I felt -- if you plop down high technology and people going on about "DNA" into medieval European fantasyland, the populace should notice and react. I felt that the whole explanation that Ry'jin was playing around with genetic engineering and dragon DNA to be rather lackluster, to be honest. Like I said, it just doesn't work in the confines of a fantasy setting. The dramatic reveal of who Ry'jin was was also painfully cliche.

...Hm. I'm really sorry about how critical this review sounds, it's just a lot easier for me to notice things that authors do wrong rather than things they do right. It's just my mindset I guess. But believe me when I say you did do a lot of things right! Though I was unimpressed by the plot twists I mentioned above, I was legitimately surprised by others, and overall the plot worked and did keep me wanting to see what happened next. The writing could use an improvement in some places, but practice makes perfect. Many of the mistakes you made in this game can be excused by the fact it's your first try. I'm sure you'll make even better games in the future, and I will look forward to your next release.

Final thought: I'm glad you put more effort into this game than just, "Look I has a dragon isn't that the bestest thing ever PLAY MY GAME IT HAS A NON-HUMAN PROTAGONIST!" Non-human protagonists are always good, yes, but you need to back it up with substance. Fortunately, you backed it up with very good substance. :)