ADUN'S PROFILE

Finally finished the whole demo. I'm impressed at its length and that I could still play more to find additional secrets and it wasn't an abrupt "end of demo, Game Over" screen, thanks to the day/night cycles.

The rest of the demo aside from the boulder puzzles in the Cave portion of the game (see earlier comment about that) were great and you had a healthy portion of side quests to complete. Unfortunately, one of these quests was almost a necessity in order to pull through the game in one piece: the beast training. If you overlook it, your stats will fall dangerously short of what's considered reasonable for boss battles like Magneton.

Once I figured out how your game balance, it became much simpler and the Mass EXP system kept me from having to worry about dead party members. A great implementation considering they like to die a lot.

Hopefully you can finish this project somewhere down the line. Perhaps I'll go play the other Pokemon Hunter games now.

I don't know yet if your other games are like this but I feel like the balancing is a little flawed in this demo, in the latter portions of it. I finished the three trials now and fought Deodar. It was a really difficult fight and I had to grind up to Level 16+ to beat her, but I was alright with this after some trial and error and figuring out her weaknesses. However, I guess this next part of the game wasn't tested enough or anything, but the frustration level started to peak at that point, with Splinter's quest into the Cave.

You have areas that drop boulder puzzles on you which I thought was a great idea at the start, but I found myself getting repeatedly stuck and/or having to go all the way back to the entrance of the cave to reset the puzzle instead of having a simple reset function provided. I had to use the F9 debug menu to get through it without losing my sanity. The Lava Cave is well done, I'd keep it as it is. But the boss is another story. That dang Magneton. Splinter's stats are very poor and this is manageable for most of the game so thus far, but in this fight, it's pointless to even keep her alive since she's a one shot wonder and doesn't have any notable skills (unlike her companions). I'd replace her but she's required to be in the party as the acting MC for the beasts.

I could be executing a strategy for this fight incorrectly, but I swapped out my normal team in favor of Cranky, Gabon, and Rambi, so I can take advantage of its weakness to Earth since Nidra and Snippit weren't doing very well. The beasties are all around Level 15 and 16. Rambi is pretty well balanced in terms of enemy strength. Cranky and Gabon though, seem crucial to this fight but they suffer the same problems as Splinter: No survivability whatsoever.

I'm probably gonna have to cheat my way through the Magneton fight since it's pretty unbeatable at this point, unless I backtrack and grind to Level 25 or something.

Edit: I forgot to mention one other thing. The player can't keep up with the incoming damage if the healing item values don't exceed it. Perhaps you were going for difficulty but the party will be run down as the excessive damage gradually brings their HP to 0 despite constant healing (Wussy Heals for 50HP). This would be okay for a battle that doesn't last so long, but you prolong your battles and compounded with the above mentioned shortcomings places those boss fights somewhere in between miserably difficult to nearly impossible.

You provide the player with a limited supply of Beast Cures (250HP heal) but there's no way to obtain more if the player needs them. I know, they were probably meant to be used for those boss fights with Deodar or the aforementioned Magneton. But with the Magneton's extremely high agility rating, healing items don't have time to deliver when everyone but Rambi dies in a single hit. You can't expect the player to be psychic and predict what Magneton will do next when his attack pattern is randomized.

That's all for now.

I've played up to the three trials area (Fire, Mind, Thunder) so far and most things seem to be working properly. There's a problem with the party swapper though, when you try to add a new member with a full party and you push Up when the selection menu comes up, the event stops functioning. I guess you might already be aware of that though.

Fun game overall and now I'm considering of checking out the earlier installments in this series while I wait for full release.