RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Yeah, making everything yourself sounds great on paper, but actually doing it is incredibly time-consuming and difficult. Good on you for choosing to taking the hybrid approach! The new maps look good, too!

Character sprites also look great. My favorite of the bunch has to be Neoma. I love the shading style and color choice that make up the shine on her bones and armor.

While I am typically a narrative over gameplay kind of guy, I tend to be drawn towards games that enable some form of player expression. Whether that be via the story in a more narrative driven game or through gameplay, I want to be able to leave a mark on a game that can be different from the next player. If the story is linear and the gameplay doesn't invoke at least some kind of creativity, then I can get bored pretty quickly.

From a story perspective, player expression doesn't come just in the form of dialogue trees. It can be like choosing who to hang out with in a Persona game, or deciding who to marry in Story of Seasons/Rune Factory, or even hidden choices like how Silent Hill 2 handles endings. You can still have a linear story with only one ending while allowing various forms of expression in the moment-to-moment gameplay, and that's enough for me to stay engaged even if the gameplay is uninspired.

Gameplay expression is also important. Even linear narrative games like the Tales series achieve player expression because not only are there several party members with unique playstyles and move sets, but strong system mechanics like Vesperia's Overlimit or Arise's Boost Attack can let you take approaches to combat that are limited only by your creativity. Devil May Cry 5 is one of my favorite action games because of its massive list of weapons and skills that can be employed to vary up combos and look cool doing it. "Going for style" is not only possible, it's encouraged. No two people will play DMC5 the same way, and it's amazing because of it.

But even linear stories with limited gameplay tools can still leave room for expression as long as the system mechanics allow for more decision-making. This video by Leon Massey does a better job of explaining it than myself. You don't have to enjoy fighting games to understand the points being made in this video:



TL;DR: Resources with multiple uses allow for smart decision making and player expression.

Soul Sunder is still up on RMN and very playable: https://rpgmaker.net/games/5751/

Each new milestone is another post game boss cleared!

Thanks for the review! I'm glad you liked it!

Yeah, I agree with you on the mapping. Environment design was never my strong suit, but in this case it was more of a technical limitation. When trying out more dense and populated maps, Eva's pathfinding bugged out and she'd get caught running into dead ends and killing any sort of tension chase sequences would have had. I didn't have time to figure out the right layout to prevent that from happening, so I just threw up my hands and emptied out the rooms.

Still, for a short game, I think this came out alright. Again, thanks for the review! I'm glad someone still remembers that this exists!