Dragon Kingdoms II: Legend of the Great Sword

This game will be fun, right? I'll just start a new game, watch the first cutscene and.. what.. what the hell is that climbing around the floor?! How is my main character so calm and relaxed around th-that thing?! My character is talking to himself, walking around a bit.. but that weird crawly thing stepped under his feet, and he couldn't put another foot forward to continue his speech.. so the game's events froze. Unable to move, I restarted, trying to read the text quickly before it stepped into my path again. He finished his speech, and I was certain I'd be able to move again.. until the spidery-monster immediately leapt and latched onto me. The game froze again for a second or two, and I was sure I'd have to restart, but it was apparently just a spot of lag before I was chucked into a battle with some random spider. What's it got against me all of a sudden?!



I liked that I was given some direction in the cutscene, I was just a bit shocked at having to battle that spider as soon as I had begun without knowing what skills were available (none, by the way) or what equipment I had to smack this foul beast around with. When I was done, I was given a further scare when the spider exploded in some weird, watery ripple and died. This was shocking and pretty unexpected, so I think a simple "argh!" from the spider might have sufficed..

Well, I avoided those spiders like the plague after my bad experience with them, and continued to head north. Thing is, I met a guy who I had a chat to, and the spiders continued to harass me while we were mid-conversation. Knowing that I was about to face impending doom soon after my pleasant chat was not something I particularly wanted. I had about three spiders surrounding me at this point, which I was not looking forward to fighting to say the least. It's not that they were tough, just that they were slightly boring when all I could really do was mash space at them. Perhaps if some skills or curative items were put in, there'd be a bit more variety to the fights. Or even a custom battle system would've been nice, but a lot of the game didn't deviate far from RPG Maker VX Ace's defaults (not even the equipment my character began with, which was the database default sword and armour).

After exploring far enough north and traversing about three different maps, I was about to step through onto the next. I was then told that this was the end of the demo.. but I hadn't really completed anything. I'd had a small soliloquy, avoided some spiders, been forced to fight some and traveled through some maps. In all it probably took about ten minutes to complete amongst being evasive and trying to find treasures.

Well, at the very least I have a few tips from what I played:
- Maps were pretty bland and lacked any real detail to them. Try adding a few more buildings or flowers, or even just different ground tiles like dirt. These will really add some colour to the world.
- Put in more NPCs and some quests to go on when the character is on the way to find his friend. Just walking on one straight path can get a bit tiresome.
- Make it so that all of the spiders stop running around when you're talking to someone. Watching them all crawling about gets rather distracting.. That, and they disrupted the beginning cutscene to a point where it crashed the game.
- Put in a bit of character interaction. At the very least, have your main character talk to himself so the player knows exactly what's going on in his head.
- Put in different types of monsters. The entire world was covered in spiders, pretty much. I was beginning to think the only two types of creature in that world were humans and arachnids.
- Put in some equipment and items. All I really found was money which was pretty pointless, considering I wasn't sure any items existed to spend it all on.
* I liked that treasure was available, but more would be nice in order to keep the journey juices flowing, like a trail of candy to follow to your objective.
* I liked that I actually knew where I was meant to be going, and I had a clear direction on how to get there.
* I liked that I could avoid encounters by running away from them on the map, but I still felt there were far too many of them.



I can't really rate this, as it only took a fraction of time to play through and there wasn't enough content to judge. Please continue making this though, as I'd like to see a lot of the improvements mentioned here.