STATUS

Step 1: Have a unique artstyle.
Step 2: Add horror stuff.
Step 3: Have no rips and sell for $15
Step 4: Pay a big streamer to play your game.
Step 5: Profit.

This goes for any indie game really. All you have to do to become insanely popular is to have a unique artstyle and have horror elements. That's it. Omori is the most popular RPG Maker game of this era and yet it has incredibly barebones mechanics and gameplay. People only like it because the art is unique and it's edgy. Pizza Tower, while not an RPG Maker game, is the same. It's literally just Wario Land 4 but only the chase sections. That's it. That's the game. And then people say the OSTs are "fire" and post non-stop remixes/mashups/rips of those songs over and over again 1000+ times (PLEASE STOP POSTING 100 SUNNY TIMMYTURNERSGRANDDAD IM SICK OF IT) while other series get completely neglected. There is only one active user making Xenoblade remixes on a consistent basis and he ONLY does Xenoblade 1 stuff because he refuses to play XB2 or 3 because "they would never live up to the hype of XB1." And then when he does do XB1 remixes he does songs like Tephra Cave instead of bangers like Engage the Enemy or Zanza the Divine/God Slaying Sword. It's really frustrating how everyone in the music community hyper-focuses on these subpar indie games with incredibly mid OSTs instead of games with amazing OSTs. Octopath Traveler 2? Never heard of them. Literally anything SMT related? Shin me-goo-me what? Way better indie games like Crystal Project, the Spark Trilogy, and Rabi Ribi come out every month yet no one cares. Everyone is all about Pizza Tower or Omori or whatever just because they have "unique artstyles." I'll say it again, graphics do not matter. The only things that matter are gameplay and story and everything that goes along with it. As long as the graphics aren't eye bleeding or intrusive to the gameplay, I couldn't care less what a game looks like. If Pizza Tower was 8 bit with megaman graphics or if Omori used default RPG Maker MV assets literally no one would care. Undertale/Deltarune proved it's worth not by fancy graphics, but by amazing music and characters. Gameplay in UT sucks IMO, but Deltarune's gameplay is significantly better especially chapter 1. Chapter 2 felt way to railroaded. But both games have pretty bad graphics and yet UT is beloved to this day with DR is one of the most hyped indie games ever for the full release. But then why is this sentiment not repeated with games with shallow gameplay but "unique" graphics like Pizza Tower or Omori? I'm just sick of people obsessed with these games instead of broadening to more obscure titles both from indies and the big companies. No one played Octopath 2 and that game was a 10/10 masterpiece. Even less people played something like Crystal Project.

Edit: If Chronicles: The Lost Page had no rips and more "unique" graphics (mainly a van-goh paint like artstyle), it would have 100,000 sales instead of just around 150/200 and I would be a millionaire. That's how easy it is to make a popular game, just be spooky and have pretty graphics. You don't need to have a good story, or good characters, or good gameplay, just nice graphics and creepy stuff.

Edit 2: Sorry about the rant, I'm not feeling the best recently.

Chronicles: The Lost Page is a good game. It's only errors are some minor spelling mistakes, a few very minor bugs, and some gameplay and story nitpicks such as the MP not restoring after you level up, (it's supposed to be like megaten where MP is limited and a resource that needs to be managed) a character's accent being hard to understand, (it's really not if you've read the original translations for any Shakespeare play in high school) and there being no real opening and ending. Also the bosses were "unmemorable" which what can I say? It's meant to be a short simple game, not every boss be some massive spectacle with huge build-up like this a Platinum Games game.

Yes, it uses RTP but your acting like using RTP automatically makes the game bad. It doesn't. Making your own custom assets is HARD. I can probably do the facesets, enemies, and battlers with enough work but there's no way I can make tilesets that actually look good. I'm awful at those. Chronicles: The Lost Page does have a coherent narrative. It's just very simple because again, it was a 2-4 hour long event game made in a month. It did get a 6/10 which is better than pretty much every other game I made, it's main criticisms being:
-Nitpicks like MP not restoring upon level up and Mundas' accent
-"Bad mapping" which mainly just applies to the last couple floors of the final dungeon which are just mazes. Because, once again, this was an event game developed in a month. I didn't have time to make a fleshed out final dungeon with puzzles and stuff, and having confusing mazes added to the horror. I'm not a 10/10 mapper, but my maps are at least passible.
-A few minor spelling errors which I didn't even notice while writing them due to poor vision. (im legally blind, can still see but very badly. I miss grammar errors a lot)
-A few minor, non-game-breaking glitches. (which will definitely be fixed along with the grammar issues)
-Too many elements, which I have already fixed in my future games I'm developing and will probably make a skill overhawl relatively soon for CTLP.
-Too handholdy with too many tutorials, which was primarily because of early feedback saying that the game was too vague mechanics-wise, especially for people who never played Octopath.

These are absolutely trivial compared to my previous games which suffering from a lot of issues. The one review I got, while very critical, made sure to mention that the game isn't bad and he's making it sound a lot worse than it actually is. Plus, a 3/5 stars on this site is pretty good all things considered especially since the review standard is so high. 4 stars or higher is considered "highly rated" by the site, so most people only give reviews that high if the game is a legit masterpiece. My game is not that, I'm a simple, short, event game made in a month with some minor flaws that most amount to nitpicks. Personally I would rate my game a 7/10, which would be equivalent to 3.5 stars on this site. Flawed and definitely not amazing, but still decent and with a lot of good ideas.

I will stand by the fact that Chronicles: The Lost Page is a good game. This isn't like Zero Gear Fighters where I was just a immature little kid and in denial that I made a bad game, Chronicles: The Lost Page is a legit 7/10 which is pretty good considering how this site usually rates things. (8/10 or higher being a masterpiece) Basiclly when comparing this site's ratings to others just take your star rating and times it by 2.25. So a 5 star game would be an 11/10, a 4 star game would be a 9.2/10, a 3 star game would be a 7/10, a 2 star game would be a 5/10, etc. So basically the higher the star rating, the larger the quality gap between ratings when compared to mainstream review scores.

As for the asset issue, yes, if you want your game to be popular or make money you need to use custom assets. That is just common sense. And if Chronicles: The Lost Page DID have a unique artstyle and had all the issues fixed, it would at least have a niche cult following. Instead it's 7/10 simple RPG Maker game using default assets that only got a review in the first place because the dev begged for one for years.