ASHES

First off, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the game. I can totally understand your frustrations with the game's battles: it sounds like you had a really tough time of it. I've had a fair bit of feedback so far and you're the first person to have experiences in that way, from the sounds of it, you may have had a run of just terrible luck, because the special moves have as pretty much as much chance of hitting as the regular attacks. Regardless, that absolutely shouldn't be happening, especially so early on, so your feedback is definitely going to be driving some rebalancing of the game's early encounters, and possibly even an implementation of an Easy Mode where you will recover fully after every battle. Hopefully that will mitigate frustrations.

I don't really want to "defend myself" in response to a review, that's terribly gauche and arrogant, but I will say that returning to save points to restore yourself was a deliberate design decision, I wanted to give the player the feeling that they were slowly penetrating the defences of this enemy, returning back to base to get resupplied. The rest of the stuff you encountered could be put down to balancing issues, but that one was a deliberate decision. Story Mode essentially negates that though, I designed Ashes to be the kind of game that appealed to me, like Vagrant Story and Wizardry, but I understand that not everyone finds those games fun, which is why Story Mode was implemented.

As far as the pauses go, I have noticed that on my laptop, RPGMakerMV games tend to run around 50% slower, especially when there's weather effects. You could be suffering from that? I don't think I made the pauses weirdly long.

If you're interested in the story, I would urge you to give it another go in Story Mode, as most of your issues seem to be with the combat and Story Mode cuts most of that out. The story was my main focus with this game and I'm still really proud of it If you're still interested in playing on normal mode, an updated version will be out tomorrow that will address the problems you've raised and some other minor issues.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to review the game! Any and all feedback you offer is instrumental in improving the game and my future games. If you ever go back to it, I hope you have a better experience.

author=V3xatious
I actually planned to give it another go on story mode! I don't know if I can update my review score based on that. (This is my first review here, so I'm learning the ropes of what I can do.) But the story was good. I was just spending so much time battling and trying to stay alive that it distracted me from having fun with the story.

I will post here again once I give it another go with the story.

I've just posted an updated version of the game with the enemy stats in the first couple areas toned down significantly. I found going back to it that it was particularly easy to get stuck into a healing loop with the two soldiers in the second fight, so I definitely think you were right in that needing toned down. I've held off on releasing an "Easy Mode" just yet, but if I get more feedback regarding the game being too hard, then I will definitely be implementing that.