Soul Shepherd

No, I didn't forget about Taunt (if that's indeed what you were hinting at)

author=zombero

author=EdgeOfChaos
No, I didn't forget about Taunt (if that's indeed what you were hinting at)

Well, then you have all the major pieces. After that, it's just a matter of optimizing for damage without pushing yourself into game-over-from-damage territory. As I've said, he's really hard right now, harder than he's going to be when he's not the last boss anymore. And he has some design issues. Currently, it isn't really clear what the optimal setup is to beat him, you just have to tweak until the numbers are right, and I intend to make it more obvious what is optimal in the next version. And the HP bars I intend to add would be more helpful here than anywhere else.

I'm assuming you got the unique weapons from Naraka? You pretty much need all the damage you can get.

I did 27360 damage, can you tell me if that's close? If he has 30K hp, I can just rush him until I land two critical cleaves. I landed 1 critical Cleave and dealt 27360, and crit adds about 5000, so it would put me over 30K. If it's above though, I need to think of something else.

I got a few of the equipments. Not getting them all, as Naraka is dumb (and 4 hypers makes the game lag severely)

Okay, not going to even bother if it's that absurd. Thanks for making the game, it was great for the first ~12 to ~15 hours at least. The game lost much of its appeal in the later bits, but that's understandable because it's newer and therefore less polished. I think I might come back to it when you make more.

About the LP: I don't really want to leave a failed LP here, but I won't delete the threads either. I'll upload one more video of the two bosses I did (edit: done), then it's done. I guess when you add more, I'll just restart the LP. I don't think I adequately showed everything, not even the first part, which is why I'm not that happy with it.

Also, I never did find the last rare gem... is it some place after Ares?

Here are some final thoughts about the game (going to be a long post).

Minor stuff
- "Hilted Strike" should be changed to "Hilt Strike" (hilted is not a word.)
- Those green bushes in Dustopia blend in with the background but also block your movement. Should be able to walk through.
- If people are teleported to a random point in the labyrinth, it seems quite unlikely that your character would be teleported to a town near the weakest land. I always thought that everyone was sent to the weak area first, and that's just where the portal drops you off. Oh well, it doesn't really matter
- Curse animation is identical to Confuse animation (maybe change them). I mean when the stars drop down on the characters, not when they have the status.

Soul System
This is really unique and is the main attractor of the game. We've already talked about a lot of these things I'll bring up, but I just want to compile all my thoughts in one post.
- Why do some souls break when unequiped and some don't? Why do souls have to break at all? Seems unneeded.
- Nothing to do with excess souls. Even the synth shop doesn't really help, as it takes like.. 4 souls of each type to make all the stuff you would need. I think if you could synthesize consumable items, I would use it a lot more.
- Soulshards repeat too much and some are hugely underpowered.

Abilities
- One of the most annoying parts of the game was farming abilities off mid-level souls, especially when the ability is the 3rd slot. I wish there was a soulshard that increases the rate at which you gain ability points or something.
- Ability unlearn menu is unclear. The new ability shows up in white but that is not clear at first, and you can be sure I was guessing quite a bit early on. I wish it would show the new ability somewhere off to the side, or higher or lower than the old skills.
- I wish you could choose which slot on your command card the abilities go into. This isn't a big issue, and I don't even know if its possible on RPGMaker, but if you could, that would be a nice little bit of customization.

Balance
The struggle here would be finding a balance between difficulty and fairness. You mostly did a good job with this.
- You probably know the problems with Ares, as you said "he has some design issues", and you're going to reduce the difficulty.
- Gloom has a high luck aspect and a huge reward, and I don't think it really has a place in a game where strategy is supposed to be the most important aspect. Other abilities are luck based, but insta death is too strong because if a character dies from it, it's VERY difficult to revive him. He revives at 100 or so HP, and most enemies have party damage at this point. For the player, it can wipe out hard enemies (esp. hypers).
- Labyrinth seems pretty unfair. Especially with random-encounter bosses.
- East town to beach seems too hard.
- The escape chance is very low vs. enemies your level, and even fails frequently to enemies below your level.

Misc
- Character walks very fast, I like that
- Bosses on the map don't match up with bosses in battle. For example, Chimera looks like a cat on the map, and Isonade looks like... I don't even know, but it doesn't look like an Isonade.
- I wish there was a way to see enemies' elemental weaknesses without testing everything, like a Scan. Because several of the weaknesses are not intuitive.
- I love how open-ended the paths were. You can choose to go several places if you want, and that's really nice.
- The game is enormously grindy. This can actually be a pro or a con depending on what type of game you like. It was a little of both for me.

Technical issues
- FPS drops when there are 3+ hyper enemies. For me at least, I don't know if it happens with anyone else.
- If I do other things on the computer than play the game, the enter key and escape key stop working and I have to restart my computer to make it work. It's a known problem with this version of rpgmaker, not sure if there's actually anything you can do though.

author=zombero
Yes! Definitely. I'm inclined to think I'd prefer the vid, even with the jumping around, but a good screenshot series could be interesting as well.

Cool! It would certainly be a lot easier, both to make and read. Typically editing the video took about 45 mins for every hour of footage, and combined with upload times and optimization and playing the game + restarts, each segment was taking around 3-4 hours to develop at minimum, heh.

Anyways I'm already missing this game, it's darn good and nothing new is getting submitted for me to review on rmn, so we'll see.

author=zombero
Yeah, there's two there. The better treasures, and the second gem, are deeper in. Although Frock is a good one as well that's not very far in. Btw, I asked several other people and no one has the 4 hyper lag issue, so I don't know what to tell you there. :/

That's not far in? Ahh. I thought I explored most of it.. At least, I was running into almost all dead ends. I guess that is why they say it's a Labyrinth though.

author=zombero
Well, Siegfried would be a lot easier to farm with the consumable item that summons him. And I've been considering raising the drop rate on FOE souls, as well, possibly to 100%. Swapping souls is intended to come at some cost, though.

I would like it if the first FOE you fought had a 100% drop rate, because the first FOE (before you have his soul) is always the hardest. It sucks so much to have to restart the game when you kill the FOE, it drops nothing, and you don't want to rest 3 times to respawn it and waste money.

author=zombero
I'll redesign the map some such that every path leads back to the stairs up before it leads onto any other path, that way it isn't possible to go the wrong way, and see if that fixes things. Plus it'll have a lower encounter rate once the mook boss (Siegfriend/Dragon Whelp) summoning items are in. Addendum: Now my girlfriend is playing this game, so I'll be getting even more feedback! It helps to see what kinda mistakes other players make and to what extent it's their fault vs. my fault, and I can see in real time how much she needs to grind and whatnot (that was how I made the observation that areas with entirely new enemies get souls at a reasonable rate, while areas with partially new enemies are slow). She's also making fairly heavy use of ailments (specifically Confuse) which I also do, but most other players don't do. I think most people just assume ailments will suck, because they suck in most RPGs.]

I would love that! It's frustrating to run into one of those column things and have to walk back. Yes, ailments suck in almost every RPG, I only ever bothered with Poison and Death because wow. I think I'll try those, though, now that you say it.

author=zombero
2nd addendum: Just watched part 9, you actually managed to beat Siegfried without discovering his trick. He doesn't enforce discovering it as much as Dragon Whelp does.

Also, just as a side note, the drop rate for enemies that use Ascension is actually a full-fledged 100%.

What exactly was Siegfried's trick? (And dragon's for that matter? I don't remember using any trick besides fire guard.) I just slap them with attacks 'til they die.

(edit) I'll restart lping when the game is updated, actually, not right now (too soon after anyways)

I just don't think people would care so much about an LP a week after this one finishes or so. And, one of the videos got 27 views, so people besides you, me, and locke are watching it ;p. Though, probably 10 are mine as I tried to add those dang subtitles and YouTube kept freezing, making me refresh.

author=zombero
I'm glad you enjoyed it despite (because of?) the frustrations

Haha, well it certainly was something... I do appreciate the difficulty of this game. Too many RMN games are the type where you can, quite literally, autoattack everything including bosses until they die. It's rare to come across a game with this level of difficult and well balanced difficulty. Most of the time, a "difficult" rpg means one you need to grind exp for hours to beat the enemies, and THEN autoattack them to death, and you more-or-less avoided this trap of just "give the enemies a crapload of stats to make them just like every other enemy but harder".

That said, the difficulty here will be too much for most people. This is the type of game where enemies can bring you from full to 0 easily in one turn, and you need to win despite this, so I doubt the casual RPG player will like it. If you want to get the game noticed/played by more (and it can be, it is high quality) you might consider adding difficulty settings. So if you like the soul-crushing difficulty of the game, you could play on it, and if you don't you could still enjoy the game at an easier level (maybe some % stat reduce for enemies or higher % drops). Though I could totally understand if you think this takes away too much from the essence of the game.