HOUSEKEEPING'S PROFILE

author=Liberty
...I liked the characters and story... I especially liked how your characters changed as you went and that they had their own lives outside of the main quest, but also that they came back to help when you needed it in the story. ^.^

As much as I want to defend a game that I enjoyed when I was a kid, the story is pretty objectively bad no matter how you slice it. "It's a product of its time" is about as far as I'd go.

Hey, thanks for sharing your thoughts so far. If you keep playing, you'll probably find a lot of your feedback a bit premature. The "side quests" that you referred to do factor into the overarching narrative. I wanted to spend some space developing characters, but I made sure to make those early stages work on a few different levels, but, yeah, I was a little afraid that the early pacing would be too slow.

The design issues are more problematic; I was often relying on VX's default systems instead of modifying them or working smartly within their bounds. Chalk this up to this being my first game and me making it very much as an rpg maker hobby project instead of using rpg maker to make a competitively "real" game. If I were to remake this from the ground up, I'd vastly reduce map sizes, add in long-term stat progression mechanics, and throw in more variance in enemy types and boss mechanics. If you want a more concise, better designed experience, give The Heart Pumps Clay a shot, but A Very Long Rope does have a lot going for it in the story department if you stick with it--though this is obviously coming from a biased source, so take that with a grain of salt.

author=Liberty
I'm of the school of thought that one identifier is enough and more than that is superfluous. That is, if you have the name of the character talking already identifying the talker, then adding a bust/face isn't necessary since you already know who's talking.

I like having names as an identifier. If you remove the names, the issue isn't that you won't know the names, but it means that you have to spend dialogue space mentioning the characters' names, especially for minor characters. This isn't a big deal, but I feel like this is one of the advantages of the medium--it lets you get into higher-level dialogue a hair more quickly. If you have busts/faces in addition to that, it lets you emote more clearly than you could with a sprite. I don't think one negates the other since they're operating on different spectrums.

I like the CEO's reasoning that he's making something antithetical to political correctness, but, like pianotm just pointed out, political correctness doesn't seem to really be a major issue in gaming. Besides, my gut tells me that they're just using controversy as a selling point. The game itself doesn't feel controversial to me since it's trying so hard to be controversial. I guess I feel that it's equivalently distasteful to something like Goat Simulator, i.e. it's a soulless cash grab.

Final Tear 3 boasts a longer game time than A Very Long Rope, but uhh, I tried playing Final Tear 3 and, well, it was too...interesting...for me to get more than five or so hours in, so I wasn't able to confirm, but it definitely SEEMED like it was going to last for an eternity.