ELDER71'S PROFILE

author=nhubi
Well Elder if you gave the game a second shot and went over an hour and it hasn't improved then I believe you have allayed any issues anyone may have had about the justification for the review. It stands as it always should have.

Well, I hope so. It's still disappointing that the maker reacted to my points so defensively though.

Just want to say for myself that the purpose of the review wasn't to be cruel. I took time to highlight the game's strengths and potential. It just so happens that its drawbacks broke it for me and I couldn't play on because I wasn't having any fun whatsoever and I don't think players should be obliged to enjoy a game solely because of the maker's time and effort. It's precisely because of the respect I have for fellow RPG Makers that I wanted to push on and play more, but for the reasons highlighted in the review, I couldn't / was made not to want to.

Others might disagree with my conclusion, but this review was my opinion. I'm sorry that the maker took it badly, but I believe that constructive criticism is much healthier than empty praise, so I detailed my experience, what I thought of it and where it might be improved.

I still plan to revisit BOTH if a new version is released. And so, if the maker wants to take my critique in the spirit it was intended and either use or rebuke my points, I'm happy to remove the one star rating until then.

EDIT
In fact, since the central qualm here seems to be how long I played for, I'm going to replay BOTH, force myself through a larger portion of it, and re-review it as it is.

EDIT EDIT
Nope, I tried.
The choices of music are strong in a majority of cases, and there's potential here for development.
But I played for an hour and a half this time and everything continued in the same vein. I gave it everything I could and BOTH remained directionless, broken and unplayable.

• Battles remain dull because enemies have too much HP.

• The plot is cryptic and to be presumed generally missing, muddied as it is by generally poor writing and grammatical errors.

• The characters aren't given any development.

• Zarkodious moves at a painfully slow speed on the world map...

• ...and the arbitrary need to eat/sleep/drink places an unnecessary, omnipresent threat of unexpected game-overs on game play.

I'm willing to follow a consensus if people believe I've scored this game unfairly prematurely, but a longer replay forces me to stand by the points I made in my original review; most significantly the point about quickly feeling drained of any compulsion to keep playing.

I'd still like to review an updated version, though, and it'd be very interesting to read another reviewer's perspective.

Looks good. In game, is this a static image or is it animated? I'd like to see that. I'd add that the party members are a little hard to distinguish because they're standing in such a straight line. Maybe worth staggering their positions, if possible?

I'm glad to see that my review was taken in the intended spirit of constructive criticism. In my experience, critical analysis, as long as it's not petty, is worth ten times as much as praise is.

It sounds like you've got a lot of plans in place for polishing things up and I'm genuinely looking forward to trying out an updated version. I'm glad to have been of some use :)

EDIT
P.s. I was afraid that I might have overused italics - want to note here for any future readers that the intended tone was one of emphasis, not sarcasm.