HAPPY'S PROFILE

Alright - I suppose I too should post my thoughts here:

- The project has a promising start, you're obviously seeing a lot of effort to pay respect to the original game concept that this is deriving from.

- I understand this is a very early prototype, so I don't judge you for any design choices made, but I am still going to be honest and give you my input on the most glaring issues I had with the game during my short session. (And few notes on where to focus on polish in the future.)

- Level Design: While I understand that these levels are majorly based on how they appear in the original game, I feel that as such they do not translate flawlessly from one engine to another.

The original game had a polygon-based actor, so when player moved from map to another, it was easy for the developers to change the viewpoint on the map, so that it wouldn't necessarily need to be from top down. (Not to mention the pre-rendered backgrounds.) Usually this viewpoint change made it obvious how the area design works, even if the point of the compass where you were headed changed.

However, with RPG Maker's view point, where you're locked to single perspective, you can't copy these map designs directly - It makes absolutely no sense that when you're walking north and enter a new area, that you're actually supposed to go south to be still actually walking north, unless the view point changes accordingly. Most people playing this game have probably played the original game to understand the area design regardless of these logic-defying design choices, but you can't use that as an excuse for illogical level design because these choices will still ultimately be a distraction for the player.

To counter this problem I would recommend to design the levels by keeping RPG Maker's perspective limitations in mind and adding to the levels accordingly. I can understand if you're worried whether this will derive the game too much from the original, but I think you could probably achieve close enough resemblance to the original surroundings, even if you designed the levels to support the RPG Maker viewpoint. I think the most important factor in the design choices is that this game would work well independently too, and wouldn't need to lean on the original game when defending unpractical design choices.

This is not the only issue with the levels. I also feel that the sense of space is skewed. In the original game you have to actually run for a while around the level to get from the other end to other, but in the Rpg Maker counter parts you just have to take a few steps to cover the same distance. The issue with this here is that if you copy the maps exactly as they are in the original game, it might result in very small and linear maps in your game that don't really have much room to move around, which in turn wouldn't really encourage for exploration and interactivity.

Now, that was my biggest problem with what you have so far. Other things I would like to point out is the need for consistency and polish on graphical bells and whistles, but considering this is very early prototype, most of those issues can be forgiven here, but not forgotten. I'd just like to say about the graphical design choices in general that you should prioritize that you're first and foremost producing something that works well independently, and only then be concerned about it matching the reference material. The fact is, it takes far greater effort to copy pre-existing material with great detail, than creating something that gives the same idea through emphasizing the accents that refer the to the original source material.

Here's some examples where I think you should take a closer look at these priorities:
- The title screen looks pretty terrible because of the rough orange outlines. It may be similar to FF8, but it doesn't look good as it is. Also the drawing is sketchy, while yes it still has a similar style.
- Everything I mentioned about the level design above.
- Interface design to some degree. The menus look good and are very reminiscent of the original, but I feel some menus are bit hard to navigate, like the battle menu when choosing targets for items and the Command menu in the main menu. for example.
- What's up with the bridge map in Deling City? It looks like it's graphically unfinished as there's black space in it even though it's out doors.

For last, here are some random problems I encountered:

- Defending in battles currently is useless. Whenever I choose to defend it won't move onto the enemy's turn. So the battle won't actually advance unless I choose another action than defending, so basically it makes defense command unusable. If I always get another consecutive turn for the same character for choosing to defend, what am I defending from?

- Difficulty balance currently doesn't exist. First two fights you can defeat by pressing 1 button. Third fight enemy deals more damage than you can heal. Somehow in the boss fight I got onto a situation where I had about 1700 health, boss hit me for 700 - 800 and I usually used a Hi-Potion after this to prevent myself from falling under 1000 health. After a while I ran out of Hi-Potions because usually there were 6 turns, of which every second turn was mine and every second turn was the enemy's. Only every six turns or so I had two turns in row. Well, after I ran out of Hi-Potions, my Potions healing 500 point just couldn't cover the amount of damage the enemy dealt and I died very quick.
Sure I could probably learn to use some skills that could actually do significant enough damage to the enemy, but the room for mistakes here was very very small, while in the preceding fights the game wasn't as punishing. I just felt the difficulty spike was extremely uncomfortable this early in the game.

It might help if you gave the player more room for mistakes in the first boss fight as it's still part of the learning process and getting used to the mechanics. There wasn't really much time to get know your skill arsenal, other than the two previous fights, but they didn't exactly call for anything else than spamming the basic attack. So, I feel that because of this much of the learning of the mechanics actually happens in the boss fights because it demands for it, but the demand is very punishing if it leaves room for no mistakes.

- While enemies and player characters are animated in the battle scene, I am wondering if you're planning to extend this to every enemy of the game as the boss (at least in my version of the game) wasn't animated. (afaik?) If you're going to do it, I'd recommend to keep in mind consistency and covering the entire area of the field with it, or none at all. (In case it is too tremendous effort.)

I really appreciate the amount of effort you're putting in this here, but I sincerely wish that you first and foremost focus on creating something solid and enjoyable, and only then referring to some other work. Let's face it - your resources aren't as extensive as Squaresoft's were at the time they were creating Final Fantasy 8, so chances are you aren't actually able to reproduce something they have done. What you are able to do however is a solid, fun and consistent game. (Look at Hero's Realm, for one example.)So when you're making design choices I hope the first thing you consider is, "is it enjoyable?" and only then "was this how they did it in FF8?" I think you have carried that out well in some fields so far, but I hope that in the future I could say it about this game in general.

That's all I can think of now! Thanks for your time and keep it up Kyrsty. I can come across critical, but I wouldn't be writing you this long unless I felt your project has a lot of potential to it.