ALTEREGO'S PROFILE

Ok... First of all, great game. If I knew how to write a review worth shit, I'd write one. But you'll have to settle for a comment. =P

Let's start with the story. At first you're like "Heh; typical stuff" But since political plots are still a step up form the more common "Warriors of light, defeat the Evil Lord" they're a welcome change of pace. All in all I really liked the story, the personalities and motivation of the characters, and the plot twists at the end; But what really took the prize for me were the endings. Very emotional stuff, all of them... That one last battle against the Golems should have been more epic, though. (Or you should remove it entirely)

The mapping/dungeon design is perhaps the lowest point of the game. Towns are pretty much useless. Not only the maps feel pretty restrictive, like you're limited to a part of the town. But also, you'll never need an inn, and stores could have been easily replaced by monster drops. Some of the npc's dialogues are fun but that's it... The dungeons. Well, at least they're not gigantic and there seem to be some thought to them. But they're still pretty much an excuse for the player to struggle their way out of them.

Battles and difficulty... Ok, battles are certainly not the kind that you win by just pressing *Enter-Enter-Enter*, which is good. You made a good selection of skills that are useful at some point throughout the game. But I was a bit disappointed that you never learn new ones, so the novelty of the battles eventually wears off-- That being said, the game is not really difficult. Boss battles are challenging, yes, and that's good; but random battles are a chore. They leave you very little exp and money, they don't drop items (or at least I never got any) and the encounter rate is kind of high. The good thing is that they're easy to escape from, but they're still annoying.

So, what I'm trying to say is here is, that a more straight-forward approach would have improved this game: Story->Boss battle->Story->Boss battle... Just the fun parts. Towns, Dungeons and random battles kind of hold it down a bit.

Ah, the music, sound effects and animations were also good. But who cares about that? ;P

Where to begin? ...Ok, the intro is a bit confusing. You're introduced to a lot of information all of a sudden, people's names, references to places, etc. And the fact that all the characters have the same soulless stare and the message box doesn't displays their names, doesn't make the task of understanding it all any easier. On a similar note, most of the game's dialogues are the same boring inter-friend drama. Try making the conversations a bit more diverse/interesting and cut down the blather.

The mapping is- well, bad. Specially the dungeons. They're not intuitive at all, they're just thoughtless mazes for the player to stumble around aimlessly for a while... When mapping try to think of every area as having its own personality- it's own history. Realize that even forest paths are man-made, so they're not endless labyrinthine messes. Play some old-school games and study their dungeon design. And look for some images on google too to draw inspiration for the areas that you want to map.

Lastly, the gameplay... At the beginning you're allowed to chose between three missions without any idea of how difficult they are. So if you chose, let's say, the tournament for your first day: you're screwed. What's worse is that during any day the game won't let you do anything else besides completing that mission, so you won't be able to train or get money in some missions. (Money and Experience are difficult to come by, btw). What does this mean? That if you didn't grind at the forest, you're going to regret it later when the game pits you against fight, after fight, after fight, without even letting you heal or change equipment between battles...

As you can imagine I had to quit eventually, but I'd be willing to give this another chance if you address these issues first.

Well, that was cute. I loved the custom art and the mapping, but I found the overall atmosphere of the game to be rather lacking, specially in the music/sound department... The gameplay, I understand that it was simple because you had little time to work on this, but if you could expand on it and make it more like an infiltration/survival/action rpg I'd be willing to play this again.

All in all, you did a good job for beginners. Keep it up! =)

Heh, Not bad. This is like Silent Hill but watered down to it's lowest possible expression. You probably had technical and time constrains to make any more of it than that, but if you're willing to work more on this then it could become a fun little game in the future.

Besides improving on the story and the atmosphere of the game, you need some sort of mechanic that makes playing it something more engaging than just: "run to the closest door". Give each ghost their own 'personality' and behavior. Think of clever ways to evade them or defeat them. Oh, and get rid of the one-touch-game-over thing. It doesn't make the game difficult or scary, it's just annoying.

Good luck!

I'm halfway through my way for the contest entries, but so far this is my favorite one...

I love the premise of the game, it striked me as something "out-of-the-left-field" as they call it. The writing it's of course, hilarious! Even when some things went totally over my head because I don't know who or what were most of the people/things referenced in the game, but I still laughed. Damn that intra-synchronicallity... whatever!

The mapping is really good, you made an exquisite use of the rtp. It's like you wanted to make cram every tile in there, but there's not a single thing that felt out of place. The dungeon design is in itself it's very intuitive. The maps are about big enough and branched out to encourage exploration, but not as much as to overwhelm the player.

The use of the music and sound effects was excellent! I rarely notice this kind of thing in videogames, but in this one every tune, every laughing track really complemented the atmosphere of every occasion... Also, kudos for the Mannheim Steamroller Orchestra's music! There were moments where I just zoned-out listening to it. ;)

The game progression was nicely paced too. Although it got a bit too difficult there at times, or maybe is that I just didn't expect any difficulty at all in a joke game. I don't know... I mean, I appreciate the little challenge, but the moment that you realize you're grinding or farming for money, is the moment that you think: "Bummer. This game is not so funny anymore". I would have preferred easier battles, so I could just keep going from one of the scenes with the Alien to the next one...

Anyway. Congrats on a job well done! =)