FREDO'S PROFILE

I played a couple hours today (just past going to the rift shrine for the first time). It's definitely obvious that you spent a lot of time refining the game, and it's fairly enjoyable.

That being said... I'm not loving it. Actually, I keep playing because I want to enjoy it, and it is generally just aggravating me. Here is my (hopefully constructive) critique:

I feel like the balance is completely off.

The characters are WAY too slow (some battles, I had to wait 20 seconds to get a turn, and the enemies would each move 3 times in the meanwhile. That is crazy. Triple the enemies's damage output and make them move once per party turn)

The elements are ridiculously annoying. Enemies get healed or negate damage from elements all the time but are rarely weak to any, even if it would make sense by rpg conventions. The number of enemies pretty just immune to the magic available to you is pretty frustrating. (On the note, Vera joins just in time for a FIRE-themed dungeon when her only ability is Ifrit? Are you doing that just to mess with the player?!) What is the point of using Oalston if he rarely hits weaknesses? If he's not hitting a weakness, I can do the same amount of damage with another character's physical attack, especially once you hit levels in the teens where basic level spells are too weak but you don't have the -ras yet.

Enemies have bizarrely low amounts of HP. I one-shotted one boss, and killed a few others in a few turns at best. It's sort of crazy. If you get unlucky though, the game can turn on you because the miss rate on some weapons seems to be just kind of nuts. This could also be caused by what appears to be an agility disparity between party members and monsters.

The characters are all very interchangeable because physical attacks are pretty much the only way to go. Elina is nice for Haste, but only because the characters are so damn brokenly slow. Everybody else either has useless/weak abilities, too little MP to use their abilities, or just really boring skills. Ami is pretty much the only exception by level 15. I just slapped the ring that gives berserk on Vahn, gave him that MP draining spear that attacks twice, and just watched him rape the first few hours of the game. I'm hoping this will change as the characters level up.

Also, I feel like I am leveling annoyingly slowly - especially characters with harsher experience curves. I would say that the difference in exp curves between a character like Elina and a character like Vera is pretty crazy. I'm not entirely sure how that will affect the balance later on, but it makes me worry. The slow levelling means slow ability gains, which translates to more stale battles while I wait for my characters to learn spells worth using.



On the plot side, there is pretty much nothing going on. Events keep happening but none of the characters seem to care. Vahn's reaction (or lack thereof) to the whole Hans thing seemed pretty crazy. He barely mentions it, and always sort of as a sidenote. Similarly it seems insane that nobody questions Vera about her turncoat ways. I understand that this is old school, and not meant to be a plot-heavy game, but I think that old Final Fantasy games actually did a lot with very little dialog. In this case though, I can't even tell you what the characters' personalities are. They all have very thin motives for joining, and their lines are all interchangeable. Without the name at the beginning of the line, I would never know who is speaking.

Also, the dialog can be painful at times. Characters have a tendency to overstate things, and they act in very inappropriate ways for who they are (I'm looking at you, Ivalice Generals who remind me of a clique of mean high school cheerleaders)

But the big problem that sapped my will to keep playing (for now) is the game progression. I have been looking for the Crystal of Wind for HOURS. We have trekked across a gigantic continent, found thousands of mcguffins, rescued children and the occasional sheep and nothing has happened! I get to a town and I am thinking "I must be close to the crystal!" the townspeople tell me "We won't let you pass until we force you to help us" and then off I go on some plot tangeant for a second. Then I go on to the next town... and the same thing happens again! And again! And again! I know that this is the "old-school" structure, but I think you took it too far here. You need to let the player feel like they're progressing with the game once in a while. My characters barely level, the shops never change their stock, and I just keep going from generic town to generic town solving generic problems while defeating enemies that fall in a few attacks, assuming my characters don't start missing their attacks like a bunch of blind drunk hobos. I rarely level, rarely gain abilities, and all the stuff my characters are learning now serve no purpose (why am I going to blind an enemy I can kill in two turns? Do any enemies even use enough magic to be worth silencing?). I fight generic bosses, several of which I fought in several final fantasies, in generic dungeons (why does this world have such an elaborate cave system?!?)


Long story short:
I really appreciate the amount of work you put into this game. Good job for completing it. I wish I could enjoy it more, but I am getting frustrated. My two cents on what could make the game more enjoyable (at least for me):
- Lower enemy speed, increasing ally speed. By at least 25% each.
- Increase boss HP
- Give enemies more obvious elemental weaknesses. Why are most fish not weak to lightning?
- Give Vahn and Nobumasa more MP. Give Vera more useful spells at lower levels.
- Break up the long stretches of plot stagnation by having an occasional, short scene meant to advance the characters and their personalities. Maybe you rescue a child from bandits, and Elina shows her motherly side by taking care of the kid. Maybe Oalston thinks Dr. Cid's lab is awesome. So on, so forth.

Just a few thoughts. Take from them what you will. Sorry for the wall of text. Congrats on getting the game done!

Enjoying it thus far, though I think I hit a bug. At the beginning of Chapter 4, I headed back to the tower. When I entered that big staircase, Snowe started moving to the right, got caught in the wall, and the game hung. I'm assuming there's a move event problem going on or something?

Not every solution is fit for every game. If changing the spells wasn't right, it wasn't right. Sounds like you thought it through and gave the game skills that fit with your vision but add a little variety, and that sounds like it might be just what the doctor ordered. I look forward to trying it!

Are the ultimate spells actually useful? In a lot of games, they are incredibly powerful but not MP-efficient so you don't end up using them much. Also, how much of an effect does the magic stat have on damage? It seems to me like Godot might be able to deal way more damage when hitting an elemental weakness than your black mage ever could with Ultima.

Maybe it's different in practice, but this Godot sounds grossly overpowered and sort of gamebreaking. I don't think a character that transcends the games mechanics (by suddenly breaking the typical restraint of MP and by having a spell list that includes almost every spell in the game) is usually all that fun to play.

Is there ever a reason not to include this character in the party?