RYAREISENDER'S PROFILE

Worst - I was working on a text-based JRPG for many years and asked for advice on a forum (not this one) once. People helped me and one person was really interested and told me he can playtest my game if I want. I told him I first want to get it into a state I consider good to release a demo of. Years later I contacted him and asked him if he still wants to try, but since he is usually playing text adventures, I warned him that my game is truly a JRPG which is quite different from a text adventure. He said he's still interested so I sent it to him, but he didn't write back. 3 months later I asked what happened and he said he felt bad to answer because he found everything so horrible. He told me what he didn't like, but I didn't find his feedback very constructive because it really just came down to him hating everything I like about JRPGs. This also completely killed the development of the game as I could never get back the motivation.

Funniest - I used to be in small gamer community and there was this guy called "Wes" and he was always interested in the games I developed but his feedback on all the games I published was that the view range of the game's map isn't big enough. I always had long debates with him about it (explaining why I did it like that and him saying how he would do it and then me explaining back why his idea wouldn't work, etc.).
So one day, I decided to make a game in which you can freely adjust the view range, but the game punishes you heavily for increasing it. Then I jokingly called it "Wide Expiration Space (Wesmaze)". And his first feedback was "I haven't played your game yet, but I judz came in to say that this game has THE BEST FUCKING NAME OF ALL TIMES". Heh! He actually ended up loving the game and even asked me if he can develop an XBLA version of it.

Most Memorable / Best - I rarely ever even publish my games and even if I do, my threads usually stay without replies or only replies from people who obviously haven't played it (like people saying I should post screenshots/videos of the game). So my most memorable moment was when a person did not actually play them, but also recorded it and uploaded it on youtube! This was like one the happiest moments of my live. He didn't really get most mechanics of the games he played and didn't really have the patience to learn them, but it still was so awesome seeing someone play my games.

OHRRPGCE is still my favorite, but I honestly haven't been in touch with RPG Makers for a long time.

Genie, Wind-Up King and Snow Butler are my favorites.

I'd claim that tutorials don't help much. A tutorial screen that pops up once is easily forgotten.

I prefer games that just put simple obstacles in your way that only can be overcome once you "got it". That way, it's much easier to remember the mechanism.

It's always a good idea to make a game start off easier, but it still should be just hard enough so a player can't just get through it without understanding how it works.

author=Liberty
The Atelier series seems to do just fine being all-crafting. Sure, there's battles too, and a story, but the main component is the crafting.

Probably matter of taste, but for me that series is one of the worst ever because of how much crafting it contains. Only Idea Factory managed to make games even worse.