Les Visiteurs Dans L'Espace

-First off, the ending assumes that I played the game because the idea of medieval people in space interested me. I actually find that concept ridiculous and hoped this would be a joke game. The reason I tried this game was because of how active you were on the forums, and I was curious to see what your work looked like.
-The battle system, I think, was actually tuned pretty well for me. I like how you balanced the enemies to compensate for the dedicated healer. Each of the characters has a clear role in the party, and the game wasn't long enough for that to become tiring or for the player to need to max out their skill charts. Battles were difficult without being ridiculous; I think the battle with the knight and the succubusy chick was the strongest moment of the gameplay for me.
-The mapping did a good job of setting the scene; I liked the glass space deck the best.
-The music sounded more like a selection of tracks from your personal playlist than a soundtrack that captured the atmosphere of the ship. There were still some okay tracks--I especially liked that little minimalist piece that starts out basically silent and slowly builds--but it didn't function well as a soundtrack.
-It was very difficult to connect with the characters given the short length of the game. I found the black mage a little interesting, but she wasn't rounded out as a character; none were, really, but that wasn't the point of the game, anyway.
-Alright, let's talk about the ending. It was terrible. Really, legitimately terrible. There has never been a compelling piece of literature that just straight-up tells you its internal philosophy--well, maybe religious texts, but I don't particularly find them compelling, either. When you make a game, write a story, a play, a screenplay, or whatever, don't come to the table with a message. Your goal shouldn't be to deliver your message to the audience. This is because: 1)you're not a genius and 2)your audience isn't stupid.

I'm telling you this coming from the perspective of someone who started out his writing career doing similar things. I thought, "This is a nifty philosophy, I should write a story that shows this!" and among these stories, hand to God, was about how the journey is more important than the destination. It was the first story I ever wrote in college. I didn't do it as directly as you, but I look back at those stories now and I'm ashamed, mainly because in order to write a story like that, I had to assume that my audience consisted of mouth-breathing homunculi rather than actual people who have spent just as much time thinking and dreaming on this planet as me. When you're making something regarding a philosophy, you should look at a theme or idea that you want to explore that maybe you don't have a clear answer on.

I hope that wasn't too harsh, but it was how I felt, and storytelling is my background.

In the context of a story, the ending is INCREDIBLY important. It's the last thing that the audience sees, so it carries an absurd amount of weight. So does the introduction. In the end, this was a game about delivering a message, not telling a story, so it was doomed from the start.

If we're talking life philosophies, I tend to agree with your basic conceit for the most part, but you're looking at only one side of the issue. If you're going to teach me a life lesson, you better have thought out the other aspects of it. If life's about the journey, then what's the point of the journey? Does moving forward aimlessly mean anything? How could a journey without an ending in mind be fueled in the first place? There are a lot of existential issues here, so simply giving an easy answer instead of really dissecting the issue or at least exploring these questions doesn't show that you've put much thought behind your game.

I think that different does equal bad in this case. It's easy to blanket everything as subjective, but the fact is there's a vast body of work that we build on as artists (if you're okay with calling us that). Let me give you an example. If I go outside and shit in the lawn and the neighbors call the cops on me, I can't say, "Look, it's a different way to do things, but it's not necessarily bad. I mean, logically, animals have to shit, so it's more natural for me to shit outside which will fertilize the lawn than to waste water flushing the toilet and creating a sewage problem." The reason this wouldn't work is that, even if theoretically I could be seen as in the right, society has grown in a specific way. Ignoring the rules that have come before you is therefore problematic.

That's not to say that you can't break rules, but you have to do so with a firm understanding of the rules set before you and artfully bend them. I think that the message is hamfisted in its delivery and simplistic in its philosophy. It might work for a very small amount of people, but I even think those people will have problems saying that it was executed well. There are too many things objectively wrong about it.

Two things about the ending bothered me. Neither of them was the message, which is a fine message. Instead, what rubbed me the wrong way was:

1) The insinuation that the player is foolish for expecting an answer to why these fantasy characters are on a space ship. The game seems to say that there's no good answer, when you could totally tell a compelling story with those trappings.

2) The character's "journey" was sacrificed to deliver that message, making the message itself weaker. At the end, the characters lose their personalities to preach the message, but by doing so, they undermine the very journey that we're supposed to cherish. The enjoyable part of the story was seeing them interact, but that all feels meaningless in the end when they seem to shed their personalities to tell us The Message. How am I supposed to cherish their journey when I can't see them as characters anymore?

To sum up, I think you can do this sort of message in a story, but I think there has to be a way that doesn't make the characters journey feel pointless.

As for the rest of the game, I thought it was well constructed, and I liked the characters and it felt like you were building something with them. The battles were above-average and the skill-learning system was good. The character's roles in battles were great and complimented each other. I liked the removal of the attack option and the priest who really wouldn't harm a foe.

There's a lot to like here, but I have to agree that the ending sours the experience a bit, despite its intention of doing the exact opposite of that. Maybe if the three "bad guys" were delivering the message to the heroes, rather than the in-your-face-ness of the whole cast telling you what's up, then it would have been better? I'm not sure, but at least with that method, I wouldn't lose the connection with the heroes that the game spent that time building, if that makes sense.