Matsumori Days

I played trough the game.

I must say, you made quite an impressive job with Masako. It's hard to write a character that's smarter than yourself, but I think you pulled it off. As for the other characters, they did have their own distinct personalities, but they never shone trough. I don't think it was the writing that failed, rather I get the feeling that the game just wasn't long enough to give all the characters enough spotlight.

Anyway, I think I'm going to focus on balancing. You said you're finished with this game, but this can be useful for the next game.

Goho has the highest attack and Masako has the highest Spirit. The other characters were somewhere between. However, being flexible is only useful in situations where the enemies differs greatly, i,e, some enemies have high defense, but low spirit and vice versa. Joruri for example, is just a weaker spell-caster than Masako. The fact that she has higher attack barely matters since it practically never pays for her to use physical attacks instead of magic.

Toshie is shafted equipment vice. Her bows have less attack, but higher accuracy. However, accuracy only matters for standard attacks, skills uses their own accuracy scores. Once you get Toshie, you're way past the point where you will ever use a standard attack, so her extra accuracy is useless. This also means that Kaitai's weapons are awesome since he gets extra attack for practically free.

To your credit, status abnormalities are great against bosses. However, they are poor against standard enemies. As a rule, status abnormalities either have to be very accurate or hit multiple targets to be useful. Against bosses you can just keep using them until they stick, but that strategy is very unappealing to use against standard enemies.

The status abnormalities are also the only element in your game that gives battles any tactical depth. Other than them, battles are all offense and heal spam. There's no buffs, debuffs or utility moves.

Later enemies are way to hard. They simple overpowers the characters unless you grind. You can get trough them with status abnormalities, but why bother? You get exp faster by grinding in an earlier area. For example, enemies in the damned trial gives about twice the exp that enemies in the sacred trial does, but it takes much longer than twice as long to kill them, so you're better off just avoiding them and farm in the sacred trial instead.

The damned trial can easily be cleared without fighting anything at all. I didn't clear the damned trial after the sacred trial though. However, had I known you don't have to fight anything there, I probably would have done so.

As for my gripe with the accuracy of weapons, it's that accuracy doesn't matter. There's no reason to ever hit attack in a serious fight. If you don't use spells, all characters have attack based skills that deals more damage than standard attacks. Those skills do not care about the accuracy of your equipped weapon. Try lowering the accuracy of all weapons to 1 and then use Flurry. You will see that Flurry hits perfectly every time. However, Flurry certainly do care about how much attack your weapon has. So, Toshie gets a useless advantage and pays for it by losing quite a lot of damage. Also, a stat that does almost nothing doesn't qualify as flavor in my book.

Masako's staffs are great. They boost her spirit for the cost of attack, but she won't use her physical skills anyway. Also, you can clear her trial without fighting anything, so she doesn't have to be in even a single fight without her spells.

Did you make your own sprites and facesets? Could you give me some advice on how to do that? I really liked playing your game and like playing games in general but i have no idea how to start making one.
Where did you learn how to use RPG maker VX?

author=Marrend
The main characters facesets were originally from a RPGM-2K add-on. "atelier" was the title of the graphics file(s) I used, but I'm uncertain if this has any reference to the Atelier Iris series, or the person who made them. Some were altered physically (most notably the ones I used for Mina, Nari, and Kojiro) somewhat before altering their size to meet VX's standards.

The custom sprites where made initially with the use of an on-line VX Character maker. This one to be specific (though having it translated kinda helped). I had to alter the graphics for some models, as "brown hair" was not an option. Thankfully, IDraw (a graphics program I got some time ago) was able to open them, which made the alterations a bit faster.

As for how I learned to use VX, I had some experience with the 2K and XP versions of RPG Maker. It was almost second nature to make stuff in VX. However, when I initially visited this site, I found that I still had much to learn. For example, if you visit the gamepage for Legacy Reborn, go to the "Media" tab, there's links to a "Let's Try" series that ended on a very sour note. Try comparing what you see in that video verses what you saw in this game, and I you will see a difference in quality control. Well, that's what I would like to think...

*Edit: Some of this information, as far as where things came from, are in the manual that comes with the game. If you bothered to read it, you would get the same basic information as I just gave. However, I would be in remission to not say that I am grateful for your interest in this game, or game-making in general!

Thanks for getting back to me with a detailed answer and i did bother to read the manual it just wouldn't open on my computer so i thought i'd ask you directly. Thanks for the help :)

I dont know if you still work on this game. I just started and am dumb(lol), can you tell me the words for the statues in the ice cave place?

Yeah and i was still so confused, I just took a nap, so im going to go try again.