DECKY'S PROFILE

Interesting pillow talk lol. An amusing intro.
Good, organic, realistic dialogue as normal.
Mapping could use some work - it's a little oversized and underdecorated.
The "off the shrubbery!" comment was amusing at first (e.g. when I was outside the protagonist's house) but it got tedious when it triggered all throughout the town.
Not a big fan of the "step on random tile and get destroyed by strong enemies" design choice.
The Black Knight was certainly amusing, if a bit random.
Some minor issues with the spell casting grammar and syntax (e.g. "Goblin does bodyslam!"). We all run into that issue tbh - it's just the way RM's auto text generator works, and I've certainly forgotten to double check it in the past.
I do like the UI colors and the sound effect choices - the activation sound effect in particular is really satisfying.
I pushed a boulder onto a switch a few times and got the same "wrong one" response. It was getting a little tedious. On the third or fourth one, I was the screen never faded back in the game autosaved. Rip.
Great dialogue, though. Really like these characters.

Time Played: 21 minutes
Scoring:
Story: 4.5/5, Gameplay: 2.5/5, Presentation: 2/5
Overall: 3/5

Clearly this is a short little novelty project mostly meant as an inside joke. I chuckled a few times, especially at the dance. With that said, I liked the sprite animations and some of the internet humor. I'm sure people got a kick out of it on stream.

The dialogue is pretty good and fitting for the young age of the characters.
Mapping is quite good. A tad overdecorated in spots, but still quite good.
Dialogue and cutscenes are very sharp and expressive (perhaps to a fault, as I'll explain below). The flow of the dialogue is great, and so are the character movements, tints, camera pans, and so forth. Very professional and cinematic for a smol demo project.
The font sizes are overused a bit, though. The excessive punctuation, capitalization, and slight overuse of emotion blurbs get a little old as the cutscenes roll on. Dialing back the expressiveness a little bit will work wonders.
The guy says "kid" a few too many times.
Still, I really like what I see here. I hope you add a few small battles in the finished version, because it's an awful long time to play without any real gameplay to speak of.
Just make sure you show a little bit of restraint, both in the mapping and in the cutscenes. Sometimes less is more.

Final time: 10-15 minutes
Score: Too early to tell, to be honest. High 3.5 for the prologue story and presentation.

A fox who is a martial artist and can heal? Hmm.
The cinematic music doesn't really seem to fit the dining room scene.
Mapping could be tightened up a fair bit. The gates and hedges are a good idea though.
I noticed a few typos here and there. Wish I was keeping track of that stuff but I'm kinda short on time.
Some interesting ideas here in terms of story and world building, but I feel like I'm being thrown from scene to scene like a ragdoll. The overall pacing and fluidity of the game is a little disjointed so far. There are only two fights - I feel random encounters in these early areas would've been nice.
As for the balancing of the fights, they are definitely easy. HP pools are really high relative to the damage, but that's not abnormal in the early parts of longer RPGs so it's fine.
I did like the secret waterfall reveal, though.

Final time: 9 minutes
Score: Too early to tell

I chose to discover things myself!
Mapping seems decent on first glance, though there are a few canopy errors right off the bat.
The gameplay already seems intriguing just by looking around the menus and investigating the statue.
I like the skills and the tradeoffs, but bleed seems kinda weak. The autocrit skill is pretty fun.
I was able to one-shot the bear at level 3, but the stunlock mechanic is beyond annoying. I hope there is a way to resist stun that I haven't found yet; otherwise, this fight is going to annoy people due to its rng nature.
Some other design issues: I had to burn EVERYTHING in the goblin fight. You can get stuck in the treasure alcove with no way to fight your way out at low levels. And since you can't save your game, I can see players getting stuck here. Big no-no.
Looks like I spoke too soon. After burning EVERYTHING to take on the goblin party, I died to the next random battle because I couldn't escape. It teleported me back to the statue. No harm no foul. I did lose all my light, though, which kinda blew.
You should just remove stuns from this game. When you only have one or two party members, it just turns fights into an annoying rng fest. Add paralysis on top of that, plus no MP restoring items, plus no healing items for Albert, plus the heal costing 33 MP...yeah, major balance issues. Fight was a big slog.
The block pushing is a bit off. Might want to have them trigger on activation instead of touch.
The mapping in general is a bit awkward. Sure, there's a lot of detail, but the elevation and map layouts are a little odd. There are also a lot of passage issues - it's easy to walk on decoration to bypass cliffs and stuff.
I'm just not feeling the design of this game in general. Random encounters shouldn't be timed. I shouldn't get into a random encounter while I'm tabbed out writing notes. I don't like how limited the healing is, especially since you lose all of your currency when you die. And with no way to save, highly limited status restoratives, and almost every enemy stunning your (only) party member, it's just a tedious experience.
There isn't even an autosave. I had to exit out of the game and lost all my progress.
I did like some of the writing and the exploratory nature of it. The awkward mapping, frustrating design quirks, and lack of save features killed it for me.
I think there is definitely some potential here. I do like some of the design ideas. The game's not particularly difficult, just tedious.
But yeah, I'd really like to see this polished up. There's a lot of upside.
Playtime: How should I know since you can't save. It was about 30-40 minutes, and I think I was close to the end. I didn't really feel like replaying it after I had to exit out.
Scores: Gameplay: 2/5, Presentation: 2.5/5, Story: 2.5/5
Overall: 2.5/5

Decent dialogue and the visual novel cutscenes are a great inclusion for a game like this. Nice use of pauses and colors in the dialogue. A few smol typos here and there.
Great use of purples overall, both in the UI and in the cave maps.
Mapping is okay overall. Good shapes and the size of the areas is good for the pacing.
Characters are expressive and their personalities tie in with their combat skills.
Skill trees were a nice touch, though obviously not utilized fully in a game of this length. I think I bought one skill per character and had no trouble clearing the content.
The skills are great, though the game balancing is very much on the easy side. The final boss in particular is a non-issue due to the low cost of counterattack. I used one potion and one ether during the game. Stat pools are huge and HP/MP rarely become an issue. Still, the actual fights are kind of fun due to all the toys at your disposal. The HoT was a nice touch, and I like that cauterize does damage.
It's the core/intro of a solid MZ rpg. Another week or two to flesh out the content and adjust the balancing would pay major dividends.

Final Playtime After Boss: 31 minutes
Gameplay: 3.5/5, Story: 3.5/5, Presentation: 4.5/5
Overall: 4/5

I really liked the gameplay in this one, to be honest. It was a fun 45-ish minutes.
Nice dialogue in the opening.
I like the Gun idea, though it took me a bit to realize that I had to reload through Guard. It might've been cool to require use of ammo from the menu instead, but it's not a big deal either way.
For a small contest game like this, I don't have an issue with the autoskip on weak enemies. For a full-length rpg, I think the feature would have to be balanced properly (perhaps via a QTE or something).
It was abundantly clear that I was too weak to take on the cave enemies (minus the sand worm). My instinct was that I had to upgrade my gear massively, which made me suspect that new items were available at the shops. Indeed, I had to go back and upgrade everything. This didn't bother me too much, and the game settled into a pattern of "activate crystal + farm old monsters + buy new equipment".
The 3 Ammo Shotgun move seems a lot weaker than Burst, which is odd.
The Shotgun missed a lot, so I found myself using a lot of Throwing Knives on single enemies.
Different music for boss fights would've been nice.
I love the fact that Esuna innoculates you from status ailments for several terms. Great design there.
I lost to the Cultists once because they kept juggling self heals back and forth. I ran out of resources and died. Once I learned the really good 5-turn buff, though, I kept that on myself and the fight was easy.
The last boss was mostly easy except for the end. She starts spamming the buff+heal combo here, and I have to keep responding with my own debuff. We kept spamming buffs and debuffs back and forth for at least 20-25 turns. This and the cultist battle probably have too much built-in self healing, especially if you get bad rng.
A fun game with lots of great combat! I just wish the balancing was a bit tighter and the mapping was a bit better.
I thought the twist ending was pretty cute.
The 3-turn buffs are pretty useless and mostly serve as red herrings.
I really liked the magic attack skills, especially in the final area.

Final Playtime: 49 minutes
Gameplay: 4/5, Story: 3/5, Presentation: 2.5/5
Overall: 3/5