INDRA'S PROFILE

-Right off the bat I was laughing my head off at controlling Metalite’s sprite.

- I’m sorry. I saw Siegmund and Reinhardt’s first scene and I though they were together…like sharing the same bed (man is it hard to get my mind outta the gutter). It doesn’t help that they bicker like a married couple either <3 (wait, they’re brothers? AWWWW)

- The mapping is a bit awkward at times, and I felt the music clashed a bit with the darker tileset style.

- I loved the battle animations something fierce, and while it’s still early to say about the whole game, the gem system is a nice feature.

- The full recover after battle is a GREAT GREAT feature. It lets me be as much of a brute as I can, without worrying about saving mp for the next fights, something that would otherwise put me on mp saving mode (aka playing boringly conservatively).

-I almost had a cow when I browsed the wares of the SECOND salesman…to find godawfully overpriced shit. Omg why is this HERE EVEN OTL That’s cruelty! I call trolling on the poor broke players!

-The music does…strange things. It will suddenly spike the volume up at some points. (After beating the game I come to the conclusion that it’s not all the music, but specific themes :I) I’m not sure if this is somehow a problem on my side or the game, thought.

- I liked the pub conversations. They were a good way to add banter, and I’m always in favour of banter <3

- The facesets were great. There were no emotion sets, but the facesets themselves expressed enough about the character’s personality that I could imagine their expression from the dialogue without any trouble.

- The alignment of the characters in battle is a bit troublesome, since they’re not tiered enough to be visible.

- Not having displays of the party or the enemies’ up/down stats was confusing and very ahrd to keep track of, since often I had no time to even read what buff they had casted.

-Huntress boss took me five fucking tries. Bitch was hard as balls.

- The reunion between the two lost brothers was…passed over? Basically they didn’t comment on it, which was strange, since it was SUPPOSED to be an important point.

- The scenes upon arriving to the capital feel a bit confusing and rushed. Suddenly BAM BIM BAM BOOM party change and critical plot points delivered too fast for me to digest. (From here on, the writing quality was lowered, which stung a bit since the beginning was so good).

- (a bit further into the capital) The text in the capital needs some revision. I’m not understanding half of what’s going on, information is given in rather confusing ways and it’s not intuitive at all from reading dialog.

- Equip Titles are nice, but of no use if I can’t change them :I

- Hibiki’s flashbacks in the desert come and go without warning or further comment by the party, which is a bit odd. Something simple like the party asking what’s up with Hibiki would have been ok, but as it is, it feels like a game interruption.

- The mapping in the ninja village and the following cave was iffy in places.

- Some enemy skills are overkill and will kill off full health allies in one hit, even during normal encounters. More so because I have no time to read what’s being cast and have trouble recognising what I should defend against.

- Keeping track of elemental affinities is very hard at the start, since enemies do not show any particular hints on their appearance. (Later in the game I got in the habit of testing a bit when entering a dungeon, but it was still something of an issue.)

- My favourites were the battle music themes, the rest were a bit over the place.

- (after the first boss fight with Fielle) Where did the Rise, Reinheardt and Shiroi pop up from? Seriously, the eventing at this point is a bit confusing. If they arrived WHILE you were fighting, give some mention of it. For a moment there I was thinking my party members had gotten the wrong sprites O.o

- After the Fiell fight the party change occurs, I’m blocked from accessing the party formation menu…and there is absolutely no explanation of this. A mention of it would be nice, because up to the moment the twins spoke, I thought they had been left on the other room. This is confusing as all heck.

- The whole thing with the Harvesters getting dead bodies came out of nowhere and felt a wee bit forced, since there was never much tension about it to be felt (it was not like the whole fuel thing was a critical matter in the city itself)

- In the imp village, Rise can’t be taken out of the party, but she’s not greyed out.

- Freya doesn’t get the multi-air spell with the wind+skill4 gems

- The music choice for the afterbattle with Kuroi and the teleport mages is…wrong. It’s a tense situation, the music being all mellow is confusing me. Same after that scene, the music choices are, to me, veeery off, and try to bring the wrong MOOD to the scenes. Same happens after you meet the green haired huntress in the castle, the music after the boss fight does NOT FIT THE MOOD AT ALL (I’m talking about the RomSaga3 music that plays when the emperor sentences the woman to the cells).

- Having Shiroi gleefully suggest they share the girl’s beds is hideously out of character and I felt my image of Shiroi screech to a halt and die. (From there on, Shiroi’s previous character seems to be scrapped for that of a classic perv old man.)

- Whys is the emperor’s son (Lord Gwynn) OLDER looking than the emperor? :/ (this may be because I recognise the sprite that belonged to an OLD MAN in Bahamut Lagoon).

- The emperor gives you (along with a weapon and armor) a Full Augment, but it doesn’t appear in your inventory.

- The castle music after you defeat the huntress is bugged, and stops playing half the notes after the first loop for some weird reason, only to return a few loops later.

- Rise's health absorb is far too costly.It’s 25 mp, same as the full party heal, and the damaege it does is not good enough to warrant that cost (more so considering ther are few times where a single target absorb spell with no element would be useful INSTEAD of actually healing as is her role).

- I did not ENJOY THE TRICK QUESTION about letting Kuroi die. Kill or let him KILL HIMSELF is not what I was expecting. And it was a pretty…nasty way to die. (I was expecting for him to survive damnit!)

- The information dump on the Devourers in the council rune after the boss fights felt a forced. “Here, have all this ifnroamtion you never wondered or cared about!”

- I was thrown off by the resort town relaxation right in the middle of a harvester invasion. Even the mercs who should have been GAURDING THE CITY are there, just chillin.

- There is no way to keep track of buffs and debuffs, and in the latter parts of the game this hurts.

- The fight with Skullhoarse is simply too darn long. I was like half an hour with him alone (minions, that were actually the hard part, dead), harmless, railing at him endlessly. He has way too much hp, and the fight’s drawn out and without any tension after you kill his minions (him killing one of your characters once every fight minutes is not exactly a threat).

- The mapping of the last dungeon was a bit iffy. I understood the concept, but the tiles themselves looked odd mashed together at odd angles.

- I had no trouble from the secret boss to the end, but I thought the no save between the last boss’s two forms was a kick in the balls. Had I not been severely overpowered by then, I’d have been extremely pissed.

So! In summary?
I enjoyed it! I played it in two long sessions, and it actually took me quite a bit of time. I THINK I did everything. Got all the frogs, fought both secret bosses. I have no real number to how long it took because I didn’t check the clock, but it was well over 10 hours, maybe 16-20, can’t be sure OTL.

Graphics were ok. It was a bit iffy sometimes when you saw a Bahamut Lagoon sprite being used for something different, some times may have looked odd, perhaps, but the mapping was okay with only a few easily overlooked mistakes. The facesets were very nice, and even if they didn’t have emotions I didn’t miss them. Combat animations were good.

The music was…not my taste. The battle themes were usually fine, but some of the tracks were…less good. Overall not irritating, but not my favourite aspect of the game.

The story…Overall it was ok. It started off very well, but when you hit the capital, the story expands too quickly, the dialog’s quality goes down, and for a while you’re left feeling disappointed because overall it lost the charm it had before.
The plot itself was…a mix of cliché an unnecessary complications, and overall didn’t seem to take itself too seriously, which was fine. I was not particularly interested in what happened next, but I had enough fun playing along that I never minded.
My interest lay mostly in character dynamics, which were well done with a few exceptions (I’m sorry, I can’t like Hibiki OTL).

Gameplay was my favourite part of the game, and lemme tell you, that’s STRANGE. I’m more of a dialog person, so I can’t express how ODD it was when I actually enjoyed the combat enough to CHASE THE ENEMIES instead of avoiding them.
Battle animation and sound was good, there were a few issues like keeping track of the enemies’ actions (since many of their skills/attacks had no animations and telling WHO is acting is a bit of a guessing game) and no way to keep track of buffs/debuffs.
Normal encounters were not easy enough to bore and (usually) not hard enough to frustrate. Bosses were…usually pretty fucking hard, but not in a ragequit inducing way. I resetted the game multiple times with various bosses to get a proper good start, but overall it was not a matter of being unfair (I rarely died once I was midway through the fight, it was just a matter of devising the proper strategy and gem setup).
The gem system was simple but effective. I was perhaps a bit disappointed there were only 6 element gems, as I was expecting more from the tutorial (my mistake), but it was never an issue (thought having to reassign them when you arrived to a new area was a bit annoying, it was part of strategy and I didn’t mind it much).
Overall my favourite aspect of the game, so good job with this. I have to stress it again, I USUALLY NEVER ENJOY THE FIGHTS. I actually fought almost every single encounter WILLINGLY. I am still a bit freaked out by this (and as people in irc can tell you, I was running commentary on the bosses all the time, being an overexcited nuisance XD)

Overall, I enjoyed the game a lot. There was a sharp sting when the text took a turn for the worse after arriving to the capital, but I got over it (still, I kinda miss it). I would, even, play it again in the future after I more or less forgot the details, and I would enjoy it again. Sure, there were many aspects that I could have enjoyed more had they been different, but hey, I invested 15+ hours in this and enjoyed the crap out of it.