ACRA'S PROFILE

I only actually played for two in-game weeks; that additional 35 day assumption is based on the capital giving +3 villagers a day (it gave me a +4 only once, I think), and with a minimum of 15 villagers needing to die per army, that's just what the math gives you. So, by that estimate, the last day of the game would be around day 45-50. I'm also not particularly wont to call any part of not 'grinding'.

I'm aware that math leaves out those odd villagers you take when razing villages, and perhaps you get a significant amount from places like that dark castle up north, so it's possible that's an excessive number, but previous experience has made their contributions kinda weak.

And yes, I'm probably mostly at the point resource-wise where I could spend days just running around in circles doing nothing, as I'm sitting or nearly on max of the gathering tools (axes/sickles/etc.), I just need to waste days until I can harvest again. Getting through a day at this point would be relatively minimal work. I just have absolutely zero desire to continue.

Those resource chance boosts seemed incredibly paltry for the coin they require. Something like 800 gold for a +40% chance to get +1 item from killing one kind of enemy? That's just not even remotely worthwhile, especially when money has been tighter than gathering tools, with me needing to dump 5000 apiece on a caravan and boat, and possibly more later on. And also to need to save money to buy gear/Beer for the Prince, in case better gear and harder enemies would come along.

Basically, I spent days 3-14 continuously walking on-and-off screens, farming dozens of barbarians in the day and orcs at night, getting a ton of gathering tools and money as a result in little in-game time, as I was worried that I might get locked into a fight based on number of days, as the way things landed, the orcs attacking the castle seemed to coincide with a day change. Also, all that grinding put me to level 13, enough to get Earth magic. Still not enough to not get absolutely slaughtered by the triple archers at the top of north tower, though.

=====
Port Traventor: Session 1
=====

Tw0Face privately sent me a request to review Port Traventor, and while I'm not particularly a fan of RTS'es, I thought it was at least worth checking out. Unfortunately, Port Traventor is not a RTS, and, after looking back through stuff, I'm not sure where that claim was actually made. It's a game about gathering resources, that much is true. But very, very, very little else.

The game starts out with one of my most-hated things; being given a defined character without a default name. After a couple minutes of thinking, I was gonna go with Reginald II, after the character's father, but that's too long, so I guess I have to be Prince Randy. About an hour in, I realized that the far better gaffe would've been to take it more at face-value, and show why these 'name-the-character-after-yourself' personally don't work for me. Alas, I'm too lazy to replay the first hour with a new name, so the reign of Prince Betty will have to wait for some other day.



Anyway, that personal nitpick aside, you're given about five-ten minutes of decent enough tutorialization about building, er, buildings, gathering resources using single-use Sickles/Pickaxes/etc., and murdering non-aggressive orcs in cold blood after stealing from them. I had a longer bit about how much of an invader and overall bad guy your actions seem, but the game aggressively does not care about a story, so I nixed what I had. In short, you'll be killing the same two kinds of Barbarians, Orcs, Dwarves, and Skeletons again and again and again.

After Tristan leaves you be, the game opens up. As much as it is able, anyway. There's a few more loose story bits, like rescuing Anglers to turn them into Lumberjacks and fighting Vivien the witch who for some reason is aligned with the Orcs, but they're like two sentences long. From then on, it's pretty much mute for a long, long while.



Here's where things stagnate tremendously. You start an incredibly slow and long process of spending several days to gather enough wood to build a quarry to build stonemasons to mine stone, then build miners to mine ore, then to build blacksmiths to refine iron, then finally use all that crap to build a Watchtower to build soldiers. To give more context, fighting the Witch took place about twenty minutes into the game. Literally nothing else happened until the Watchtower was built, which took almost three hours and about two in-game weeks.

That three hours consisted pretty much exclusively of wandering between three boards; the castle to pick up new villagers to train, and two other boards adjacent to harvest all the stuff. Despite the map being littered with a multitude of forests/mountains/farms to harvest the appropriate materials, you can harvest an infinite number of goods at one spot (assuming you have enough Lumberjacks/etc), making them seem a little pointless. As mentioned earlier, though, you need Sickles/Hammers/etc. to farm, so you need to constantly redo enemy encounters to get more Sickles and such, so you really have to constantly do fights; about a dozen a day to stay on track with your unit production.



I realize I've said nothing about the battle system yet, because it's extremely basic. You have just your Prince, and you fight two-three enemies at a time. You have basic attack, two worthwhile skills that you can use based on how much you get beaten up (there are buff skills, but they're mathematically self-sabotage; boosting your attack by 20% for three turns is less damage than just attacking one extra time). And then you have elemental magic, which is slowly given to you as you level. Dwarves and Skeletons hate Fire, Barbarians hate Dark, and Orcs hate Water. Apart from Orc mages becoming immune to physicals for a bit via Ghostrick, enemies have nothing going on. Except Orc Archers; they sometimes attack for 100 x 3 damage, which in groups is a death-sentence. Oh, and you also fully-heal after every fight.

The ceaseless grinding for resources was bad enough and would've been enough for me to not want to bother, but I didn't want to end without at least reaching the soldier/army phase, just in case that changed things at all. And so three completely wasted hours later, I had a Watchtower.

I still had to make the units, but fine, whatever, at this point that's barely anything more. Now, on two of the boards I've been allowed to access early, there are these black knight dudes on the map. Later on, I'd see three more. There's eight total. Apparently, killing every last one of them is the big goal of the game.



Talking to them lets you choose between three formations; one favouring knights, archers, and, soldiers with slings because apparently they're too hip to use spears like normal-ass soldiers. There's no actual difference between them, just one wants iron, one wants lumber, and such. After building up this army, you select one, send them in, and.



A cutscene plays and they auto-kill each other, with you having no input and your Prince taking no part in the battle. And yes, all the soldiers you sent in died, so you got to build up another army. All enemy armies seem to need the exact same unit amounts to conquer, so it literally would be just repeating this process another seven times. The town gives me 3-4 peasants a day, and the least human-heavy formation needs 15 soldiers, so that'd be another 35 days of grinding to get enough human meat to get rid of all these armies. It took me about 3 hours to get through 2 weeks of completely brainless and monotonous grinding. Yeah, no, that's a wrap for me.

The easy thing would be to leave it at that, but the better question to ask would be 'how would I improve it?' Well, the first is pretty obvious, which would be to simply reduce the numbers of garbage to you need to build stuff. The enemy variety obviously needs a tremendous boost, too. The Prince being by himself also makes battles innately basic. Tristan the tutorial soldier and, uh, green priest dude could be additional party members instead of just letting him wander and murderhobo around all by himself.

But what I think is the most noteworthy area to improve would be to do something more worthwhile with multiple gathering points. In concept, it's a bit of unique flavour. In practice, it's pretty nothing. Maybe instead of being able to do all the gathering as soon as daybreak hits, limiting each spot and making the player wander more. If you got rid of full-heal after battle and made enemies not opt-in, then you now have to be aware how much you're capable of handling in a day, so then maybe one day you worry about going to the mountains to mine, then the next to the forests to chop. Then there's something to be said about the timer. As far as I could tell, there was no penalty for taking weeks to get anything done. I feel something could be done with this, to put pressure on the player and set goals for the day.

I realize that any one of those are drastic changes that'd result in a completely different game, but I had a loooot of time to idly think while grinding. And this doesn't even touch on the whole army aspect, which definitely feels incredibly lacking. It definitely should be more than spending resources to insta-end a fight, though. Maybe have the Prince fight the enemy leader, and the faster you can kill them, the less of your units die.

Lastly, actual concrete existing issues. There's no way to directly see if your Farmers/Stonemasons/etc. have been used for the day or not. Towers can be done to do more grinding in one-go, but all they give on completion appears to be common items, nor do they stay finished, so they feel a little pointless and undercooked.

I won't be coming back to finish Port Traventor. I simply don't see anything more to get out of it at all. It's about 25 minutes of game stretched paper-thin by grinding and nothing else. Next'll be back to Notes from Province, but even that might be a while.

=====
Notes from Province: Session 2
=====

Did Bronze Coliseum, fought Ryoma at end. Afterwards, Kyme's basic Slash now heals MP a tiny bit, based off of how much Bleeding he's been inflicting. It's kind of impressive how intricate their movesets are. But so far, the fights have been kinda lacking in difficulty, so I'm a little worried all this effort and nuance is gonna be sorely underutilized.



On the way out, bumped into the thugs Jack and Zack, which gave an interesting little conversation where Ezekiel and Sita actively acknowledge each other. Then killed a rat man and a mechanically interesting optional boss rat under Sita's house. Multiple times through said rat dungeon, Sita would say something context-sensitive, like asking big-cross man Ezekiel if he couldn't just crush the rats.



Both these things impressed me, considering there's probably no guarantee I'd have these two in my party at this random point, if there's, uh, I think it said seven other party members. It could also be that I'm over-estimating how nonlinear this game actually is. Or maybe I'm just incredibly used to all party members becoming completely mute once they join the party. Also, why do so many people have dungeons under their houses? Bolinda had one, too. Maybe that's the only option when most/all of a game takes place in/around town.

I actually didn't bother to talk too in-depth to Bodrick the first time I met him, and upon returning to open Mr. Verner, well, I had pretty much cleared his whole laundry-list unknowingly. So yes, maybe I am over-estimating the nonlinearity, as it sounds like that's mostly all I can do at this juncture. It seems that Sita and Ezekiel pretty much have to be the first party members, with the rest being later, so it's a safe bet that it's them or nothing at this point, thus easy to plan around.



Beat up the Squid down south, got the ability to buy weapons. As usual, the game gives options; right now, either have Counter last longer or for Kyme to have more MP. I know those High-HP/Low-HP targeting snakes would've been duped by Longsword, so maybe Counter's the better option, when I'm not broke from wasting it on winning garbage from the chest minigame. I just have an urge to clear out a minigame on-the-spot if it's something I'm capable of doing, y'know? Even if it is a terrible financial decision. At any rate, I feel worthwhile shopping choices are a woefully underutilized concept, and am happy to see any game where it isn't just a linear 'this just better' checklist to cross-off when in the newest town.

So I guess I'm actually kinda mostly outta things to do except go up Mt. Verner. Sounds like it'll be an actual dungeon. To be honest, I was low-key expecting the monsters to be total pushovers, as pretty much everything in town felt like a non-issue (or it absolutely ass-blasted me, like that plant), and all the neat combat mechanics were gonna be let down by extremely easy monsters. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case. The foot of Mt. Verner only seems to have three monsters, but they can hit quite reasonably hard, and take a bit of a beating.



At least initially, anyway. The party started getting stat up levels at, uh, somewhere between level 6 and 8, which nearly doubled their stats, so that made a pretty sizable difference. What definitely felt great was duping all these snake dorks into all blowing their turns on getting Countered by Kyme.

Have to stop there for now. Just at the entrance to a watery cave in Mt. Verner, and have just skipped the Spider Cave a few tiles back. I figure the Spider Cave is harder, so I'll do that second. I'm at about 3 hours in, though it probably doesn't feel it by reading this.

Bugs/Typos/Quirks:

- Saving and reloading in the boulder puzzle near Julius Cheeser resets the positions of the rocks. You can almost trap yourself there doing this. You can get out by saving ontop of the rocks' spawn location, though, and you'll be able to phase out of the rock. I imagine this is just how the engine works, so I don't think there's much you can do about it.
- Actually, the reason I felt the need to reload and found the above bug was because I accidentally skipped the 'push rocks' tutorial, which turns out didn't say as much as I thought it did. I don't know if RPGMaker works like this, but I've personally found the way to handle sudden walk-on events like that is to put a short (0.2 seconds) delay to buffer inputs, so the player doesn't skip text boxes they aren't expecting by holding down the up key.
- Not really a bug, but I wanted to mention it anyway. I sometimes feel the combat dialogue is a little too fast, that I have a bit of trouble gauging how strong specific attacks or enemies are. Especially Sita and her multi-hit attacks; I don't really have time to mentally calculate the sum of her damage, since they're so zippy. If this is something that could be an easy option toggle, I'd look into it, but it's hardly worth worrying about if it isn't trivially handled.

=====
Notes from Province: Session 1
=====

This first part is going to be a bit scattered, since I generally don't feel I have much worthwhile to say just yet, as it'd mostly amount to walking into stores and finding out what they do. They're certainly written fine, and the adventurer's shop in particular stands out as pretty funny when I tried to go into his kitchen, but I just don't see that as very interesting or insightful to anyone at all. I'm simply wandering around town and learning stuff, not really making active decisions in the process. And that's perfectly fine.

First though, lemme back up to the very start. Two presumable party members, Sita and Cyl, make quite poor first impressions in the first couple minutes of the game, the former attacking you with less than no reason and the latter being a homeless woman sleeping in your house. Very shortly after that, you're given free-roam of the town.

And from that, what comes to mind from wandering around the town for about half an hour is Harvest Moon / Rune Factory. Or maybe Animal Crossing is more apt, as Mr. Rooftop seems like a pretty on-point evil Tom Nook meme wannabe.



I'm not sure how complicated it all is to set up in RPGMaker VX Ace, but the house mechanics appear to be quite impressive to me. Although, being an RPG, I suspect I'll ignore the house-decorating as much as possible to save money to buy better equipment early.



Speaking of maybe-not-that-impressive-but-I-think-is-neat, all the interactables in the environment have little ellipses above them. Very handy to tell what you can look at and what you can't. And as this screen mentions, day and night seem like a pretty huge deal, which further cements the Rune Factory analogy.



I also must note that the game has quite an impressive amount of progress logs and checklists and overall a very player-friendly interface. I do think if there's anything missing from the base menu, it's time of day. Maybe it's just something I don't have yet, like getting the ability to run on the field from Rio. Actually, since I later found a clock in the Hot Springs/Inn, I'm almost certain I'll find one sooner or later, so probably disregard this.



Further on this, even in-battle, the game is generous enough to supply you with ample information, even down to each enemy's individual tactics, like the hornet multi-attacking and being super-weak to Counter as a result. It's neat and definitely makes them feel distinct, possibly at the cost of immediately defanging themselves. Low-key feels like something you'd either get from a scholar-type party member scanning them or from defeating enough of them, but I'm getting distracted. It's good.

There's a surprising number of fights in-town, not the least of which are the wandering hornets. Somehow, they don't bother anybody else. Anyway, they seem to work fairly well as intros to Kyme's various skills, who I initially pegged as the party's tank due to his moveset, even before I found shields for him. That said, Recovery seems incredibly good for being absolutely free. Maybe I'm just used to MP being a resource you have to spend with care, but having an easy way to recover it gives you a lot more options in battle a lot more frequently.

Lemme append my earlier statement about not making active decisions. I suppose I did make a conscientious decision to keep wandering town after finding the route to Frost Falls and to keep wandering around town after finding the medicine thief. It's currently shortly past midnight (Hot Springs clock), and I hope I don't suddenly faint when 1 AM comes around, and I hope James and Lily's mom doesn't die from me ignoring that sidequest for so long. I don't think the latter will happen, but definitely curious about the former, especially with how big a deal your house is made to be.



Having had my fill of town (lots of doors are locked if it isn't evening, and I guess I mostly squandered that time-window, as evidently like 2 AM doesn't qualify as night), finally getting around to finishing with the medicine, where my first party member, Ezekiel joins, even though I was absolutely stomping that assassin anyway. Next, getting around to Frost Falls, and Ezekiel leaves, after being in the party for all of 30 seconds. I was kinda wondering about how it'd handle getting party members 'early'. I wonder if they'd have just stood aside while the bandits went at me. I kind of assume they would. I later found that I probably could've gotten Sita incredibly early, too (I guess I either missed her house or it was locked by time-of-day), but the thing about Counter is, it's a busted ability when alone, but wholly unreliable when in a team, so ironically, I think finding other people might actually be making me weaker short-term.



Frost Falls is an extremely short area, and basically re-affirms that Cyl is basically wholly unstable. Doing the area started a new day, which I guess put an end to my hypothetical goal of never sleeping. This seems like a thematically appropriate place to call it a session, even though I don't feel like I personally accomplished much. I actually recruited Sita in her house before deciding to call it quits, but nevermind that. Next session, I think I'll start by looking at the arena Ryoma mentioned up north.

Bugs / Oversights / Typos:
- When first entering the Dance Studio, Rio was doing his inputs off-center from his D-Pad. I think it's due to him wandering around a bit, so it's not a guarantee he'll be in the center when movement starts.
- Buff tutorial text vs. Zack has some text go offscreen.
- Ryoma softlocked the game after giving me three shields. I was in his spot when he tried to sit down. The dancer kept dancing, but I couldn't move or open the menu. I initiated conversation from his left, closer to the piano.
- 'C' wasn't assigned to the C key initially. It's the input that Shift/Spacebar is, but. I fixed it by using F1, but I had to start a new save for a minute to re-find that bit of info. Maybe this was changed from another RPGMaker game? It seemed like it affects all save files once changes. Maybe I changed it by accident when mashing buttons to try and find a run button at some point. Definitely hazy on this, and I'm probably straight-up wrong here, but maybe you should take a look, just in case.
- Cyl referred to herself as 'a women' after defeating the first Snow Urchin. Cyl seems like nothing short of a lunatic though, so maybe referring to herself simultaneously in first-and-third-person is on brand.

Notes from Province sounds like it's right up my alley. I'll see if I can't get a part done by the end of the week.

...Is what I'd say, if I weren't having the exact same .exe issue I had with Keeper of the Fog. I'll definitely need to look a lot further into this, as it seems like it's gonna be a recurring issue. If I ever get it to work, though, I'll absolutely play it. Looking around a little, I've found a fair few other people complaining about this 'extract failed' issue... back in 2016, and it doesn't look like they came up with much of a solution, either. If it wouldn't be too much of a hassle, could you make a .zip for your game, as well?

Atiya, the password puzzle is fine. At least, once that book name-drops Celephais, it's really easy to backtrace the collection it's from. It is, after all, the driving point of about 80% of the game, so I don't think you can hand it out too easily.

I personally did think the cussing was a bit overkill, especially towards the end, but I didn't feel too much like bringing it to attention. Dana is justifiably angry at the end, so angry = sweary is reasonable enough. It's, also, well, it's very easy to call out a mechanical shortcoming as it's pretty much an objective affair, but in spite of / because of my rambling nature, I don't consider myself a particularly good writer, so I don't feel qualified to call out dialogue quibbles unless it's really obviously bad.

I definitely don't want to give the impression that Princess Pri was bad, just that I had aggressively nothing at all to say about it, which was kind of a problem for me when I hoped to do both a review and some fanart for last year's Secret Santa. In all honesty, it was a bit tricky to say as much as I did about Keeper of the Fog without it feeling like a play-by-play of every room, which would feel kinda self-defeating for a short game, I'd think.