DE'S PROFILE

Parralex, sed lex. Look it up.

I agree with most of the review, I see no part where he's contradicting himself or talking nonsense.

OK, I'm at the boss at the top of the tower and I'm sooo confused about his barrier. Is it he or the barrier who recovers 100 HP every turn? Is the enemy with the Barrier status him or the barrier? Is the barrier invincible? How am I supposed to beat this boss?

Anyhow, going through the review in order:
- sprite graphics are from Romancing Sa-Ga 3, the chapsets are mixed (the opening is from CastleVania SOTN IIRC).
- boss battles are not very good. The bosses mostly just attack and have no real strategies, and you have no way to form your own as you have so few options. The bosses deal too much damage and you have to heal almost after every attack, and since you usually have only two party members it means only one is dealing damage and advancing the fight towards its end. They're also as fast as the party. They have too much HP and the strategy to defeat them is static, so after just a few turns you're going through the motions and not thinking at all, like an automaton. Normal fights suffer from this too (Lilith attacks, Nero attacks with the Flame, heals if necessary, but it's rare; that's it). Characters need more skills with varied effects - Nero has 3 skills that do damage and 1 that heals (at the point of the game I'm at), it's always a no brainer which to use. Lilith is even worse, she basically has a standard attack and a super attack you'll use constantly against bosses. Her third option is useless because the DBS algorithms are broken.
- puzzles were OK. BTW, I didn't even know that the "Exit Key" allowed you to leave the dungeon, as in it was optional. I thought it would be used automatically later on to advance the game.
- the bit about the trick boss fight was spot on. If I hadn't read this review beforehand I wouldn't have known you were supposed to sit there and get pounded. In FF4 it is very, very clear you should not attack your shadow, here it isn't even mentioned (that one line of dialogue is not enough).
- the story was OK, it's only the first part so I bet it'll get better. There was one cutscene I'd cut from the game (pun intended), the one with the queen and some other people who were never introduced - I had no idea who they were, what they were talking about, and overall it was a waste of two minutes of my life.
- I agree about the characterization, I think it is the part of the game that needs more polishing. Everyone is samey, they talk in a similar fashion, they don't talk about themselves only about what is going on around them, they have no quirks, and so on. They have no real personalities.
- music was great. Oh, apart from that RE2 tune, but I've played that game so many times it's like branded onto my grey matter and so felt out of place. But that's just me.
- one more thing - I hated the part where you're sightseeing the town, talking to all the NPCs, and moments later you switch to Lilith and are supposed to talk to everyone AGAIN (and let me tell you, there are a lot of NPCs in there) to find that one person who will advance the plot, and you're given to directions AT ALL, you don't even know who you're looking for. It made me want to strangle you.
- oh, passability issues - in the town you can walk on many indoor doors.
- there are secret bosses in this game? Where? I'm pretty sure the only optional encounter I found was the demon thing sprite in the desert (against two brawlers).

My rating for this game would be 7/10. It has the potential to be 8/10 or 9/10, but it needs lots of work.

Items are not infinite and there's no way to replenish them unless I missed something and some monsters do in fact respawn.

I don't remember Shadar ever doing anything to me, the battle just ended abruptly. Maybe there's something wrong with your coding. Oh, and I'd drop that regen thing, it makes the battle less immersive and brings the mechanics to the forefront, which is generally a bad idea. Just give him 99.999 HP.

...and a hidden alchemic laboratory infested with monstrous failed experiments.

If this came from someone else I'd just shake my head and move on, but coming from a guy who made the previous demo and its awesome nocturnal gothic castle and then downgraded it to this... gray castle of boring... I don't know what to say, really. Don't get me wrong, it's your game, you can do whatever you please, but to me this change makes NO SENSE AT ALL. You made the opening part of the game, you know, the part when the player gets hooked on the game (hopefully), you made it WORSE on purpose because y-... eh, whatever, it's your game. It's just rare that I see someone make an awesome game and then change it for worse for no reason (Duke Nukem Forever notwithstanding).

Cray, your logic is flawed. The human-tree size ratio is not static. The smaller the character, the smaller the trees can be compared to him. Why? Because the bigger the sprite the more realistic proportions he has and every piece of scenery has to be more realistic too. When you have a 16x16 sprite you can get away with 32x32 trees, or even smaller, because he's essentialy a big head with legs and arms. The trees can thus be stylized too. When you go up to 32x64 or so, the sprite starts to look like a real human, and the trees need have more real sizes too.

When I was working on a post-apocalyptic MMORPG with 32x56 (roughly) sprites we made some 192x192 trees and they were still too small! So we had to make additional ones, 300 or so pixels tall, maybe more. Compared to those your trees are TINY. But that's the problem with bigger scales - double the size of a sprite and you quadruple the amount of work.

Oh, and such large sprites look like shit with just 3 frames per direction. Just saying. 6 frames is a minimum IMO.

First impressions - I like the game, but the bosses suck. They deal lots of damage and I'm forced to relegate the hero to the medic role, which makes the battles seem like they're in permanent bullet-time (as in slooooow). Dungeons are cool, non-respawning enemies are... I'm on the fence on this. The party is like a perpetuum mobile - the hero (gah, his name escapes me) can restore own MP after every battle for free. If so why didn't you make the party refresh automatically after every battle to save the player's time?

EDIT: read your comment on this, it's still possible to make it restore the party to full after every battle - simply auto-activate a switch at the beginning of every encounter (in the database, of course) and make an auto-event that heals to full if the hero is in the party.

Oh, and I don't like the new prologue, the old one (with the Magus castle chipset) was miles better. Overall it seems strange you've remade the whole game because of... erm, why exactly? The old version was perfectly fine IMO.