Matsumori Days

The initial release of the Chapter 2 demo has been uploaded today! With any luck, it should be available for download soon. As far as I can tell, this demo is fully backwards compatible with save files made with the Chapter 1 demo currently on-line. Note, though, that if your only save file is the one that was made in response to the save prompt at the end of the Chapter 1 demo, I fear you're going to have to start over. :(

Now that the warning is out of the way: For those interested in just the Chapter 2 content, I'm mostly sure you can just unzip the files and overwrite any old files. I don't think there's much difference between the demos, map-wise, but the Chapter 2 demo is more complete. Closer to cannon, as it were.

In case this needs to be said, the Chapter 2 demo includes all events/maps/scripts of the game up to the end of Chapter 2. So even if you're new to the game, you can download the Chapter 2 demo and not miss on any of the things that happened in Chapter 1.

Happy gaming!


*Edit: I'm looking at my dungeon designs for Chapter 2, and I wonder, "What was I thinking?" As such, they are going to be totally re-vamped within the next few days. While the current version is perfectly playable to the intended ending, don't expect to be wowed by dungeon design.

My characters were a bit lacking on the characterization front. I'll admit that. However, I have a more defined direction for them now. I might not necessarily ask myself "Is this Joruri?" or "Is this Katai?", but they should be more well-defined than before.

Also, I'm working towards a party introduction change. I was going to introduce two party members a Chapter. That way, your party-able characters would max out at Chapter 3. Considering that Katai comes out of absolutely nowhere as a party member in Chapter 2, I thought it would better if he joined in Chapter 1. Using this method, the rest of the party will join in Chapter 2.

To say the least, the contents of the game will be changing quite a bit. Hopefully for the better! Obviously, I'm not ready to make any progress on Chapter 3 because of the content change.

It has come to my attention that the critters of the Wind Trial are a bit on the difficult side, given the resources that can be acquired. Sodas do not heal enough damage, and relying on techniques (which are not disabled when a character is Silenced) isn't particularly effective. I actually found magic was a better answer than techniques. Given that the enemies can Silence a party member at any moment make for turns where a character does absolutely nothing. This is not a good thing.

I'm not quite okay on the idea of upping the effectiveness of the health restorative items. What I plan on doing is only allowing players to complete trials in the order they are "supposed" to do them in for Chapter 1, thus allowing me to unlock the more powerful restorative items with a more reliable base. This means, however, that the player will have less control over what is happening in Chapter 1. It might be a total hassle (re-writing Mina and Chojiro, mostly) but I think I can get away with it for Chapter 1. Chapter 2's slightly more open-ended nature will probably remain intact.

I'm also vaguely considering ditching the current magic learning system I have. I thought it was a neat idea, but I'm beginning to wonder how many people realize that when a "teacher" asks you to return later, that means, for the most part, to talk to them immediately after beating them. Since all characters learn magic at the exact same rate, you could, in theory, max out Toshie or Kojiro by the time you finish their trials in Chapter 2. I'll be looking into various possibilities as to the best way to deal with changing class without altering any stats or equipment.

In the case it hasn't been noticed yet, the bosses of the Trials stop acting after a certain time. This was probably most noticed in the Fire Trial. Now, I reveal why they do that: the only action I programmed them to do was spam skills according to their elemental type. They stop acting because they don't have enough mana to use whatever skill is being used. I've play tested a Level 7 party against the Fire Spirit with "normal" attacks enabled, and I was still able to beat it using my normal strategy of using Burst Attack and using Sodas.

I have no idea how quickly I will be able to implement these changes, but they will surely be done before the Chapter 3 demo is released. Hence, the reason I but these notes into the Chapter 2 blog and not the Chapter 3 blog.