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Seeric
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I believe RPG Maker and similar programs are capable of producing fantastic, unique, and enduring experiences and I love hunting down hidden gems. That being said, I admit to a near-equal love of wonky or horribly broken games and enjoy reviewing games on both ends of the spectrum.
In my opinion, the worst thing a game can be is perfectly average as such a game lacks both passion and a sense of identity.
In my opinion, the worst thing a game can be is perfectly average as such a game lacks both passion and a sense of identity.
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The Guardian
Well, I just finished this game and I liked it quite a bit, but I do have to agree with EdgeOfChaos on several things. Pumping up Agility really gives the game an inverse difficulty curve as, aside from at the beginning, you usually can kill off any given normal enemy before they even attack and even bosses usually only get off one or two attacks while you get in several dozen. Reducing boss health and raising their agility and attack power as EdgeOfChaos suggested really would go a long way towards making the fights more intense and not simply time consuming.
Spending 4 GP to get a point of BP also begins to feel pointless very quickly for anything other than Armor as AP boosts quickly overtake BP ones. I think this could actually be fixed in a few ways. One way would be to simply make the GP to AP conversion start to cost more after you do it enough, such as that after 50 conversions it costs 3 GP for 1 AP, then 4 GP for 1 AP after 100 and so on. A different way would be to make individual stats cost most after they hit certain milestones as this would encourage players to spread their points out more; players would probably be more hesitant to continue to only put points into agility if it started costing 2 AP after hitting 100 (or something like that) while other stats still only cost 1 AP.
Otherwise, I thought this was a fun and interesting game and I wouldn't mind it getting either a spiritual or literal sequel at some point.
Spending 4 GP to get a point of BP also begins to feel pointless very quickly for anything other than Armor as AP boosts quickly overtake BP ones. I think this could actually be fixed in a few ways. One way would be to simply make the GP to AP conversion start to cost more after you do it enough, such as that after 50 conversions it costs 3 GP for 1 AP, then 4 GP for 1 AP after 100 and so on. A different way would be to make individual stats cost most after they hit certain milestones as this would encourage players to spread their points out more; players would probably be more hesitant to continue to only put points into agility if it started costing 2 AP after hitting 100 (or something like that) while other stats still only cost 1 AP.
Otherwise, I thought this was a fun and interesting game and I wouldn't mind it getting either a spiritual or literal sequel at some point.
Sacred Mana
I just got done playing through Sacred Mana and sent you a link via mail to the document I made listing errors in spelling and grammar. I also noted several general improvements which could potentially made, though I downloaded my version on the 24th so some of these suggestions may not apply to the newest version.
Also, I'm not sure if it has been fixed in 3.0, but there is a game-breaking bug in the prison where a noise startles the guards and one of them jumps into a wall, which in turn makes the game freeze up as the cutscene is unable to play out in full.
Also, I'm not sure if it has been fixed in 3.0, but there is a game-breaking bug in the prison where a noise startles the guards and one of them jumps into a wall, which in turn makes the game freeze up as the cutscene is unable to play out in full.
The Haunted Review
Thanks, this game has just been bothering me every time I looked at the list of unreviewed games and I wanted to get it out of the way. I wasn't at all expecting it to be as broken as it is though nor to show as many signs of unfilled potential as it did, it's really just a shame.
Tetra Master
Oh, I love Tetra Master! I haven't actually tried this out yet, but it'll be fantastic if this is a solid remake. Are there any plans for potential lan-based play in the future?
Demons/Dark Souls and hard as shit games.
author=LockeZ
I mean, Demon Souls deletes your character if you die a second time before getting your souls back, right?
Not quite. Dying once makes you lose all your souls, but creates a bloodstain at the point of death where, if you reach it, you get all your souls back. Dying again simply creates a new bloodstain and the old one disappears. So, if you die with 20,000 souls and try to make it back and collect 5,000 souls along the way but die before reaching the original bloodstain, the 20,000 soul bloodstain is forever gone and a 5,000 soul bloodstain appears in the place of death and so on. The Souls games are also very smart about giving you frequent shortcuts and checkpoints, so unless you've been very, very careless you rarely will lose more souls than you could get back within 5-10 minutes.
The trick is that it's a penalty which 'sounds bad' (oh no all my money and exp I was planning to use to level up is completely gone!), so it's something which builds tension as players definitely do not want it to happen. However, in actual execution, it barely sets players back at all and there are likely all sorts of other ways they've made progress in to counterbalance it, such as finding new gear, opening up a shortcut, finding some consumables, or simply becoming more familiar with the area's dangers. I'd say that NES games are the same way for the most part; needing to restart Contra from scratch or getting a Game Over in Mega Man and starting over from the beginning of a level are harsh-sounding penalties which raise tension, but which only set the player back a few minutes.
It's probably worth noting that the Etrian Odyssey series is a bit harsh in this regard as it leads to a standard Game Over, but it lets you keep the map you've drawn, the importance of which I cannot stress enough and which is probably impossible to completely convey unless you've played yourself (i.e. having a map marking all the hazards, shortcuts, and nasty enemies you've thus far encountered is far more useful than any amount of grinding in that series).
As for exploration or some other form of freedom as to what to do, I really do think this is vital to a good 'hard' game. Even if a player has to eventually do everything anyway, it is simply frustrating to run into a brick wall which refuses to budge. Even if there are no tangible stat/gear boosts a player can gain by 'being able to do something else first' the player may simply find one path easier than the other and will gain more skill at playing the game (ex: IWBTG offers several branching paths and Super Meat Boy allows for some leeway with level skipping while also offering plenty of secret side levels and an entire 'dark world' with harder versions of all the normal levels and the player can bounce between these choices pretty freely).
I think the Souls games are so renowned in large part because they have completely mastered this technique; choosing a single area and sticking to it from beginning to end in these games will almost certainly lead to pure frustration, but simply rebounding back and forth to slowly inch through each area and obtain gear/abilities/items/levels/general-skill results in the player receiving a nearly imperceptible chain of micro-boosts and a sense of constant progress, in turn leading to a general lack of frustration because there will very rarely be a point where the player is forced to spend hours grinding for and dying to a fight they just can't seem to win.
EDIT:
Agreed about the flexible difficulty. I don't think an 'easy mode' necessarily 'works' with all games (especially ones like the Souls series which are designed with high difficulty in mind and which contain some sort of multiplayer), but if a game does have flexible difficulty it should be able to be toggled at any time and not just at the start; having some way to increase the difficulty in a way other than 'everything hits harder and has more health' like in Bastion is also always nice if it leads to higher rewards (whatever those rewards may be).
Demons/Dark Souls and hard as shit games.
These are two of my favorite games and I love games in general with high difficulty as long as it is fair; these games work because it is always your fault if you die, not just the game throwing something unavoidable at you.
I generally like to refer to these games in particular as 'modern games with a NES mindset'. By this I mean that they are obviously 'modern' as far as gameplay goes; graphics aside the core gameplay mechanics are not things you would see in a NES game. However, the way these games present themselves very much feels similar to the way an average NES game does in four crucial ways.
First, there is very little handholding - there's a brief tutorial to teach you the basic controls early on and then absolutely everything else is left up to you as the player to figure out.
Second, enemies are carefully placed to take advantage of the environment - modern games tend to have enemies with a few neat tricks and they get placed just about anywhere, but in these games, like in many NES games, even the weakest enemy can severely injure or outright kill you because it is placed in such a way that it suddenly becomes dangerous (usually by making it able to knock you down a pit like so many NES bats and birds).
Third, memorization and experimentation vital and failure has minimal consequence. While you can technically get through the whole game without dying, this isn't going to happen, at least not on a first run. Careful planning can save your life, but you ultimately need to experiment to see what the best way to deal with each situation and enemy is. Being able to get through a previously nightmarish encounter unscathed due not to any tangible upgrade, but simply because you have understood how to properly approach the situation is fantastic and is very much how many NES games are designed (ex: many people think of Contra as an extremely hard game their first time through, but it's actually not bad at all after a few attempts). Furthermore, the death penalty is very low in order to counterbalance the high rate of death; losing all of your souls sounds terrible, but it usually only takes a few minutes to get them back and any items/gear/shortcuts/etc unlocked will remain with you and any minibosses usually remain dead forever.
Finally, the AI is meant to be abused. Whether it's intentional or not, the enemies in the Souls games are deadly, but not all that bright. Both the games themselves and the playerbase tend to actively encourage taking full advantage of these shortcomings to make it through the day; pattern recognition, an understanding of enemy limitations, and getting creative with the tools one has at one's disposal are the keys to success here.
Now, how all this applies to other games is another matter entirely and depends in large part on just what the game in question is. For example, a traditional turn-based RPG or one with an ATB system is going to need some degree of actual grind unless you make some pretty big changes (no leveling, the ability to dodge attacks like in the Mario & Luigi games, etc) or if you make the difficulty come from something other than normal encounters (ex: the Etrian Odyssey series gets a big chunk of its difficulty from environmental hazards and forcing players to find ways around fights they can't win). On the other hand, this can work well with platformers - both the 8 and 16-bit consoles have dozens upon dozens of great examples of 'hard yet fair' difficulty - though far too many indie games these days take the I Wanna Be The Guy approach of requiring pixel perfect platforming from beginning to end along with many 'joke' deaths the player will have no chance of avoiding the first time through (often to a far greater extent than IWBTG, which was a game which understood the importance of checkpointing and kept the blatantly cheap stuff to a minimum).
So in short, games with a focus on difficulty have the potential to be great, but they need 1) frequent checkpointing or some other form of meaningful progress 2) a minimal death penalty (even many older games and roguelikes with permanent death are usually so short that they can be gone through in about an hour, making even a late-game death not actually all that bad) 3) difficulty which neither comes from raw numbers nor from deaths which players have no chance of avoiding on a first time through other than via pure luck and 4) a sense of discovery and freedom alongside the high difficulty (Etrian Odyssey, the Souls games, IWBTG, roguelikes, and even Super Meat Boy are packed to the brim with secrets to discover and optional content and often give the player a good amount of freedom as to how he/she wants to play and what he/she can do) - creating a game with the mindset of 'I am going to make this thing as masochistically hard as possible' without an understanding of how to make the experience a rewarding, entertaining, and fair one will inevitably lead to a terrible game.
I generally like to refer to these games in particular as 'modern games with a NES mindset'. By this I mean that they are obviously 'modern' as far as gameplay goes; graphics aside the core gameplay mechanics are not things you would see in a NES game. However, the way these games present themselves very much feels similar to the way an average NES game does in four crucial ways.
First, there is very little handholding - there's a brief tutorial to teach you the basic controls early on and then absolutely everything else is left up to you as the player to figure out.
Second, enemies are carefully placed to take advantage of the environment - modern games tend to have enemies with a few neat tricks and they get placed just about anywhere, but in these games, like in many NES games, even the weakest enemy can severely injure or outright kill you because it is placed in such a way that it suddenly becomes dangerous (usually by making it able to knock you down a pit like so many NES bats and birds).
Third, memorization and experimentation vital and failure has minimal consequence. While you can technically get through the whole game without dying, this isn't going to happen, at least not on a first run. Careful planning can save your life, but you ultimately need to experiment to see what the best way to deal with each situation and enemy is. Being able to get through a previously nightmarish encounter unscathed due not to any tangible upgrade, but simply because you have understood how to properly approach the situation is fantastic and is very much how many NES games are designed (ex: many people think of Contra as an extremely hard game their first time through, but it's actually not bad at all after a few attempts). Furthermore, the death penalty is very low in order to counterbalance the high rate of death; losing all of your souls sounds terrible, but it usually only takes a few minutes to get them back and any items/gear/shortcuts/etc unlocked will remain with you and any minibosses usually remain dead forever.
Finally, the AI is meant to be abused. Whether it's intentional or not, the enemies in the Souls games are deadly, but not all that bright. Both the games themselves and the playerbase tend to actively encourage taking full advantage of these shortcomings to make it through the day; pattern recognition, an understanding of enemy limitations, and getting creative with the tools one has at one's disposal are the keys to success here.
Now, how all this applies to other games is another matter entirely and depends in large part on just what the game in question is. For example, a traditional turn-based RPG or one with an ATB system is going to need some degree of actual grind unless you make some pretty big changes (no leveling, the ability to dodge attacks like in the Mario & Luigi games, etc) or if you make the difficulty come from something other than normal encounters (ex: the Etrian Odyssey series gets a big chunk of its difficulty from environmental hazards and forcing players to find ways around fights they can't win). On the other hand, this can work well with platformers - both the 8 and 16-bit consoles have dozens upon dozens of great examples of 'hard yet fair' difficulty - though far too many indie games these days take the I Wanna Be The Guy approach of requiring pixel perfect platforming from beginning to end along with many 'joke' deaths the player will have no chance of avoiding the first time through (often to a far greater extent than IWBTG, which was a game which understood the importance of checkpointing and kept the blatantly cheap stuff to a minimum).
So in short, games with a focus on difficulty have the potential to be great, but they need 1) frequent checkpointing or some other form of meaningful progress 2) a minimal death penalty (even many older games and roguelikes with permanent death are usually so short that they can be gone through in about an hour, making even a late-game death not actually all that bad) 3) difficulty which neither comes from raw numbers nor from deaths which players have no chance of avoiding on a first time through other than via pure luck and 4) a sense of discovery and freedom alongside the high difficulty (Etrian Odyssey, the Souls games, IWBTG, roguelikes, and even Super Meat Boy are packed to the brim with secrets to discover and optional content and often give the player a good amount of freedom as to how he/she wants to play and what he/she can do) - creating a game with the mindset of 'I am going to make this thing as masochistically hard as possible' without an understanding of how to make the experience a rewarding, entertaining, and fair one will inevitably lead to a terrible game.
Ruins of Rydos
Legality issues aside, I don't think it's at all a bad thing to point out things that could be improved as, while making a slime with the same outline as a babble is unlikely to lead to a C&D or being sued, such things will be picked up on and a commercial game can receive a good chunk of negative criticism or even be ripped to shreds because of it (ex: I know a game called Black Sun gets a good bit of negative feedback for having sprites which look and animate a bit too close to those of Metal Slug despite otherwise being a decent enough product). Not to mention, it's good to encourage people to develop their own style anyway and moving away from copying outlines is an important step.
That being said, Jude's original post, while much-needed and wonderfully thorough, was decidedly worded far too harshly, especially at the end.
The game looks nice in general so far though to me and seems to have a neat 'Genesis RPG' vibe going on in its aesthetics and color palette which I always enjoy seeing (though I do agree with Liberty that the blue used in the menus should be tuned down a bit, especially if you are actually going for a Genesis look since games on that system tend to look 'washed out').
That being said, Jude's original post, while much-needed and wonderfully thorough, was decidedly worded far too harshly, especially at the end.
The game looks nice in general so far though to me and seems to have a neat 'Genesis RPG' vibe going on in its aesthetics and color palette which I always enjoy seeing (though I do agree with Liberty that the blue used in the menus should be tuned down a bit, especially if you are actually going for a Genesis look since games on that system tend to look 'washed out').
Little Girl That Could
This looks like it could be a fun premise, though good execution will always trump a good concept, but you may want to be more careful with your grammar (this is something anyone should do, but it's especially true if this is going to be a commercial game).
In particular, I'm seeing some singular/plural confusion between nouns and verbs in both the game description and the screenshots (comics...was, all the stuff...come, etc), comma placement issues (ex: "Lazrael, the bear is..." instead of "Lazrael, the bear, is..."), and some word mix-ups which weren't picked up by an automatic spellchecker (ex: "gets picked up" when the context suggests it should be "gets picked on" and "Expect Lazrael" when it should be "except Lazrael").
These aren't game-breakers by any means, but even one error in spelling or grammar during an important scene can really kill the mood and such issues can mean the difference between a great game and an 'ok' game depending upon how frequent and/or severe they are.
In particular, I'm seeing some singular/plural confusion between nouns and verbs in both the game description and the screenshots (comics...was, all the stuff...come, etc), comma placement issues (ex: "Lazrael, the bear is..." instead of "Lazrael, the bear, is..."), and some word mix-ups which weren't picked up by an automatic spellchecker (ex: "gets picked up" when the context suggests it should be "gets picked on" and "Expect Lazrael" when it should be "except Lazrael").
These aren't game-breakers by any means, but even one error in spelling or grammar during an important scene can really kill the mood and such issues can mean the difference between a great game and an 'ok' game depending upon how frequent and/or severe they are.
What Can I Expect From Here?
The community here is actually pretty good about giving feedback, but it is usually more in the comments section of game pages or via PM than it is via review. However, there are a few factors which explain the relative lack of reviews.
First, not everyone who plays a game is necessarily going to give it a review; this is true of games everywhere, but RPG Maker at least at the present time has a niche audience and, though rpgmaker.net has a very respectable active community size as far as RPG Maker websites go, it is still a niche gaming audience so the sheer quantity of reviews is going to be lower than on a site aimed at more mainstream games. Secondly, while they are relatively minor, there are a few mandatory review requirements here (300 word minimum requirement, etc), so all of the "This game is great because it has great graphics and I thought it was fun! 5/5" reviews which make up an alarmingly high percentage of reviews on other sites get filtered out here. Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the vast majority of games here are RPG's and, while some are in the '5 hours or less' range, many are 10-20+ hours long, so this, in addition to people working on their own games and finishing up playing previous ones, means it can take some time for a person to finish (or at least get significantly far in) a game so that they can review it.
tl;dr: Welcome to the community and don't be afraid if it takes a while for reviews to appear for games as the community is far from dead and offers plenty of feedback and advice via comments, forum posts, and PM's.
First, not everyone who plays a game is necessarily going to give it a review; this is true of games everywhere, but RPG Maker at least at the present time has a niche audience and, though rpgmaker.net has a very respectable active community size as far as RPG Maker websites go, it is still a niche gaming audience so the sheer quantity of reviews is going to be lower than on a site aimed at more mainstream games. Secondly, while they are relatively minor, there are a few mandatory review requirements here (300 word minimum requirement, etc), so all of the "This game is great because it has great graphics and I thought it was fun! 5/5" reviews which make up an alarmingly high percentage of reviews on other sites get filtered out here. Finally, it's important to keep in mind that the vast majority of games here are RPG's and, while some are in the '5 hours or less' range, many are 10-20+ hours long, so this, in addition to people working on their own games and finishing up playing previous ones, means it can take some time for a person to finish (or at least get significantly far in) a game so that they can review it.
tl;dr: Welcome to the community and don't be afraid if it takes a while for reviews to appear for games as the community is far from dead and offers plenty of feedback and advice via comments, forum posts, and PM's.
[Poll] Status effect against bosses
author=LockeZ
I don't think "random chance to instantly kill a boss" is a great plan, period, no matter what secondary effects you attach or what limitations you impose.
Well, an instant death spell should never work on a boss - in the case of a boss fight such a spell would just deal damage and ignore the chance to kill. A 'Death' summon which deals dark damage to bosses (or to normal enemies if it doesn't instant-kill) would be useful against anything light-based or anything which simply has a high resistance to the more common elements.
However, I think how viable instant-death (and other status effects) is really depends upon the overall game. A spell with a high chance to kill and even one which can hit multiple enemies is fine in a game with an average or above-average encounter rate where a player may defeat dozens or even hundreds of normal enemies in a single dungeon. However, If a a game has a low encounter rate, non-random battles, and/or tends towards encounters consisting of 1-3 fairly strong enemies instant death no matter the percentage can really trivialize things; if normal encounters are designed to simply give players something to do while going through a dungeon or as fodder to ensuring players are at a high enough level for a boss fight, instant death is understandable, but I don't think it's a good idea to include it unless with a very small success chance if individual encounters are still designed to be threatening (you could just make miniboss-esque normal enemies immune to instant death, but if it doesn't at least deal damage to enemies when they're strong, then that implies that it's only really useful against foes which both the player and the developer view as little more than wastes of time, which calls into question just what that spell and those enemies are really doing in the game in the first place).
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