WHEELMANZERO'S PROFILE

Pfft, you call that critical? The angry video game nerd would scoff at such a thing! Thanks for the additional feedback Berry, I'll address everything as best I can.

Ragnarok is pretty much designed to be a very simple villain whose motivation comes from his general perception of the world. His "final boss" speech in the intro is meant to articulate the fact that through his eyes, the correct state of the world is to be covered in darkness, while light is an anomaly that needs to be destroyed. Not a very deep character, I know, but trust me, there are plenty of other villains in the game who have deeper motivations for their actions.


Lianna's reasons for living are not only the primal fear of death that generally grips human beings, but her anger over losing her family. As noted later in the story, Pandora considers giving up and killing herself a way of surrendering to the wishes of the world she hates. We all know villains tend to be sore losers, heh heh. Later on in the story, Pandora does show signs of mental trauma, but that's all I can say for now.

The scene where Lianna's mother explains the history of the world is meant to cement the fact that people generally fear dark mages because they know they have the potential to summon Ragnarok, hence the hatred. I felt that the angry mob attempting to kill Lianna was enough of a demonstration of the persecution of dark mages, and that another scene of a similar nature would've been redundant.

Both Draconus and Lanith have backstories rehashed in optional, unlockable cutscenes, showing how each of them first encountered Pandora and became her allies. Considering how many backstories I'm telling, I'm surprised I didn't give the shopkeepers their own.

The initial battle at the start of the game is designed to be the final boss battle of a typical rpg, hence the genericness. Neither Ragnarok nor the heroes are designed to be attached to at all. The heroes do their thing, then are never seen again due to the 200 year time jump. There are bits and pieces of their past unlocked through cutscenes later on in the game, but mostly the player is never meant to care about whether they live or die.

The battles are meant to be the meat of the game, designed to hold the player's interest through custom animations, moving battlebacks, sound effects, and the summon mechanic to add a little variation. I wanted the player to actually look forward to fighting, as it is what you generally spend the most time doing in an rpg. I personally prefer random battles to touch encounters, because the latter actually trains me to dodge enemies and avoid fighting, not to mention enemy sprites tend to clutter up a map. There's a script in the game that prevents encounters from popping up every 3 steps, so the encounter rate won't be all that abusive. To phrase it more briefly, the battles are tailored to my personal tastes.

I was actually worried that having so many trainable summons in the game would make it too grindy, so I designed a rare candy-like item that grants exp to the summon currently in the party. The item can be either purchased or won through a certain event, so it should help take the edge off of summon training while adding more value to gold. The exp curve should prevent players from making any one summon too OP, as the item grants 300xp a pop.

As for the roles of the summons in the demo, Draconus was meant to be the area of effect attacker, Lanith is a gimmicky psudo-white mage, and Chimera is the physical heavy-hitter. I tried to give each summon their own gimmick to keep things interesting, but from a technical standpoint, you don't have to recruit a single optional summon to beat this game. Recruiting summons and having them learn new attacks is meant to be fun, but not mandatory, and some of the summons do have similar functions.

And now for the giant pink elephant in the room; the intro length. I honestly cannot think of a way around it that wouldn't involve me butchering Pandora's backstory and diminishing its emotional impact. The initial battle with Ragnarok is meant to provide some stimulating interactivity for the player, while the cutscenes are meant to lay the setting, draw them into the story and get them to understand Pandora's motivations. The intro is by far the longest string of cutscenes in the game, but isn't mandatory, so if the player wants to get to the nitty gritty, they can reboot the game and choose to skip it. F7 also skips through dialogue, so the player is never required to sit through any one cutscene.

Well, I hope I addressed everything adequately, and it only took me 70 paragraphs! Everyone's motivations and character will be flushed out throughout the course of the story. Except Ragnarok, that guy's just a jerk. Thanks again for both your time and feedback, and I hope to hear from you again once the completed version is up and running!