RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Congratulations for completing this game! I'll be sure to give it a playthrough when I get the time.

Thanks for the review, lobo! Sorry you were let down by some of the aspects of the game, but I think I achieved what I set out to do, and pianotm knocked it out of the park with his additions. It's also a shame you aren't gonna do ng+ since that's where I feel the game is at its best. But hey, if the initial playthrough was at least amusing to you, then mission accomplished! Comedy games are unfamiliar territory for me, so I'm glad at least some parts of the game landed with you!

My main question is what exactly is the inspiration for Princess Nia since this character archetype is rather common.

My intention for creating Nia was to take the trope of "spoiled princess growing as a person," and go hard in the opposite direction for laughs. With her tantrums being so loud and so obnoxious they break the game's design, her antics only get worse the more you play and mess around. I had absolutely no interest in giving her character any real redeeming qualities, and thought that seeing just how far she'd go to get her way would be enough of a reason for players to keep going.

Thanks again for the review!

So I gave the demo a shot on stream because I liked the core premise and found the character art charming. After playing it, though, I felt let down that most of that charm didn't translate into the actual game.

For starters, most of the lore in the game's description isn't even hinted at in the game itself. At least not in what I played. The most I could find is by reading Dew Claw's description, but it's never once brought up by the cast. Cheiki and Southpaw don't have much personality after the initial cutscene, and what little dialogue they do have is too focused on the immediate goblin base raid to dive into either of them as characters. Most of the lore in the game's description is also not only unsupported, but almost contradicted in the gameplay department. For example: if Cheiki bound her soul to Dew Claw in order to use fire magic, why is her one and only starting skill a wind-based attack?

The battle system, at least, was functional. The idea of guarding to restore MP and gain turns faster is a good one, but in practice, only the MP restoration really mattered. By the time I reached the Goblin King, most enemies were already doing 0 damage and I was running away from battles just out of boredom. My biggest issue was the fact that skills cost a LOT of MP. So much so that the flow of battle for every character fell into an unchanging loop of use skill --> guard --> use same skill. The MP restoration and turn order change effects added to the guard command is a good idea in theory and adds more incentive to use a often neglected command. In practice, however, guarding to restore MP just elongates the battle without really adding much tactical depth. Sure, you could use weaker skills successively to keep offense going, but then it takes two hits to kill a goblin when I can usually kill it in one with a stronger skill.

There are a number of ways to reduce the down time between skill volleys without sacrificing the pace of battles, such as adding MP charge to basic attacks, reducing skill costs, give party members MP regen per turn, restore all MP after every battle, etc. but it all boils down to how you want to pace your battles. Due to how rapidly you gain levels and skills, it's impossible to get a feel for the intracicies of your battle system before you become so overpowered that tactics just don't matter. Also, there were many typos, grammatical errors, and skill descriptions that need updates. A couple of things I found were 1) all the MP-restoring items referred to MP as SP. 2) Cheiki's Tornado Slash seems to inflict a defense debuff, but that isn't anywhere in the skill description, and Southpaw's Soul Slash says it inflicts Stun, but the behavior seems more like Confusion to me.

All in all, you put a lot of effort into creating custom character art, so I wish that you wouold bring the characters's personality and battle style to the forefront next time you work on this game. The artwork and intro showed a lot of promise, and I hope the final game delivers on that promise. Please let me know if I need to clarify or elaborate on anything. Otherwise, I'll be happy to play the game again once it's updated/completed.

Hey Marrend, I played this on stream Friday because I wanted to see what you would do with a remake of this game. I don't remember much of the original and I didn't go back to read my review since I wanted to go in as blind as possible.

First off, it's great that you want to put emphasis on Ruri's classmates. I think the idea of making them more involved in Ruri's day to day life is a good one. However, in the hour and a half I played, I didn't glean too much insight into their personalities outside of what was already presented in their main dialogue. I'm not sure how much emphasis they will have on the main story (or even which ones will be party members), but the extra bond dialogue doesn't do much to make any of them stand out as distinct characters or make me interested in getting to know them more.

It really doesn't help that Ruri herself, despite being so full of energy and cheerfulness, doesn't do much to bounce off these characters. For example, her initial introduction was a single line and then a light bolt zip to her desk. Her speed is incredibly unusual, and I wish the rest of the cast had at least SOME kind of reaction to it. Without it, her being full of energy feels very mundane and a natural part of the world.

I'm fine with the long, lore-heavy intro because it's relevant to the eventual field trip to Iwayama. What I'm not fine with is that the field trip itself was over in about 5 minutes and there was no real payoff to the lore dump. We just went, got attacked, fought our first battle, then left. It's fine if you just wanted to share trivia on this location (assuming these are real Japanese legends about a real place), but it overpowers the narrative being told. If the classmates (or even Ruri herself) had more of a reaction to the trivia, that would make it more relevant to the player, but I can tell you that I've forgotten 90% of the lessons just because there was so much of it for no apparent reason.

What eventually got me to stop was Ruri going back to the mountains to investigate, and being stopped at the cave entrance. I don't understand the point of even being able to come here other than grinding, which isn't what I want to do since it won't move the story forward. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if I played everything the current build has to offer, but I'm at a stopping point and there isn't a hook to keep me moving forward.

As for the battles, I like the flow of using basic attacks to power up your TP to cast spells. However, basic attacks usually defeat enemies in one hit, and so battles are over before I can really experiment with Ruri's skills and how they can be used. I think a magical girl RPG should put more emphasis on magic instead of clobbering enemies with your weapon (unless Ruri is meant to be a physical oriented magical girl).

All in all, I feel like the main emphasis of this game is Ruri's relationship with her classmates instead of battles or even the main plot. If that's the case, then the classmates need to be brought out a lot more than what is presented here. There needs to be more unique conversations with more reactions to what is going on in the world and the teacher's lessons, and more back and forth with Ruri herself. There needs to be more immediate rewards for forming and developing bonds with her classmates, and the overall objective of Ruri's investigation into Iwayama needs to be made clear to the player so they have a goal to work towards.

Hyyyyyyyype!