AMERK'S PROFILE

I typically feel that my initial 4 party members will be the most balanced. I've used them the longest, grinded for them to appropriate levels, am familiar with their strengths and weaknesses, and they usually have the staples to getting through most battles (healer, fighter, mage, support).

Now on occasion, you will find a party member who is better than your initial 4 people party (maybe your initial 4 didn't have a good mage or healer, or one of the newer characters has better fighting skills or resistance). In those circumstances, I may swap out one of my initial 4 for one of the newer ones. However, I seldom ever swap back and forth without being forced to, even in games where the reserve is getting EXP at the same time as my active party. Once I decide who I want my 4 to be, I stay with them.

This is sort of why I liked the Lufia: The Legend Returns, because all your people joined in battle and you never had to swap them out, other than maybe to put your weakest people to the back so they got hit the least:

I'm planning to play the sequel's demo, although not sure if I'll play it all the way through, since it tends to spoil me for the final release. The only other thing I can really recall was the path to the fly-off, the screen that is left and south of where you encounter Link for the second time and the blob guy comes.

On that screen if you make your way around and up to the chest, touching the left side of the screen resulted in my brother triggering an endless amount of random encounters. We couldn't duplicate it since, so it may have been a fluke, or maybe you had an invisible event there that was meant as a test or variables for the touch encounters.

Otherwise, I agree, if you keep working on polishing the details here, you may never get the sequel finished. I'm hoping to see the end of Shade's journey and return to the sun at some point. :)

author=Liberty
And no, it is not a victimless crime. Money is being diverted from the creators of the product by people who want it for free instead. Just because some people buy it and then use the pirated version doesn't mean all will and EB is still missing out on the money that they should have made waaaay back but didn't. Don't kid yourself in to thinking this isn't a crime that hurts people.

Just because it benefits you doesn't mean it's right. God.

While I applaud EB and Degica for finally getting this out to the Western audience, I can't help but feel a lot of the problems we now have with piracy of the old version could have easily been avoided had Enterbrain not sat on it for so long and refused to sell it outside of Japan. That money "they should have made waaaay back but didn't" could have easily been had if they had only released the damn thing when they should have. It might not have stopped every pirate, but it probably would have prevented quite a bit of it from those who have been clamoring to sell commercially with it for the past decade.

All that said, for those who choose to actually make a game with 2K3, I encourage those to at least purchase the legite product. It sucks for commercial users who can't use the patches with it, but for every other hobbyist not looking to commercialize, it at least offers a bit of support to both Enterbrain and Degica, even if you do resort to using the illegal version for patch-related purposes. Things have been much too quiet in both channels (nothing new from Enterbrain in almost 3.5 years and not much more from Degica), so showing support even for something as trivial as an older maker might put a bit of life back into the Maker series and encourage them to make something new.

author=Craze
the high fantasy set is fugly as hell. pixel myth is great but like you said, really limited.

I don't think it's so much that it's ugly as it is different and doesn't seem to fit well with the way RPG Maker works, but I'm basing that on trailers and screenshots I've seen and not so much actual experience.

It just looks like it would have worked better on a different piece of software rather than RM, and possibly in 3d, if not isometric. Of course, the more tiles and resources for HF there are, the more consistent it becomes, but still doesn't look right, at least to me.

I'd say one thing the official English release for 2K3 will (hopefully) do, is encourage people to actually try and customize their games without relying on scripts, and maybe realizing that (outside of some missing features) the same can be done for XP, VX, and Ace.

In fact, the inclusion of scripts on the later makers should have been treated as a bonus add-on to enhance projects even further with heavy focus still on custom events, rather than the sole reliance of scripts.

2K/3 may be old news, but as a person who prefers to use events and doesn't like to rely solely on scripts, I've learned quite a number of things in eventing from 2K/3 that I've even tested and implemented in VX and Ace... many of which are often requested via scripting.