SYNBI'S PROFILE

The font is the only thing in the screen that's not pixelized like FF6 sprites and tilesets are, so it does stand out. Not a problem in my book, with it being so well readable and all.

Yep that's right :) At this point after playing so many Rpg Maker games I feel it's my responsibility to provide the player with a magic/skill system that's anything else but the common: "Here's Fire 1. After a couple of levels... here's Fire 2. Grats, Fire 1 is now useless!".

Now I just have to make sure it's worthwhile to make those most effective combinations a bit less obvious and varied, rather than have the player combine 3 strongest damage-dealing abilities together and never look back, hm.

In this "lost" Square game which never had an overseas release and is often overlooked, magic was learned by combining words or letters together which resulted in different spells and effects.

For example:

"IG" was the basic root word for a fire spell. You could write as a spell "IGNA" and you'd have a fire spell that targets multiple enemies, or "IGNASU" for a stronger fire spell. Same with other elements: "AQU" was the root word for water spells, and "-NA" makes it hit all enemies. "IGAQUNATOS", for a combination of all these spell effects, with some added power... And so on.

In addition there were numerous unique spell-words that broke the normal word syntax rules, like "STELLA" which drains mobs life or "DEATH" which, well, does exactly that. And you were rewarded for staying sharp during fights and writing down the spells mobs/bosses used, and even improvise on their syntax to get more power out of them.

The limit of letters you could write was something like 15, and it was fun to experiment with different words to see what crazy things you could come up with. It'd be fun to tinker with a system like this in Rpg Maker, as it could result in something fantastic with some improvements.

The thing is, is it even possible in VX Ace? I wish I knew more about scripting than I do. What I was thinking, basically: Input a dummy hero's name, then check if any part of that input contains desirable combinations of letters, then add a skill with those effects. Seems impossible to do with eventing, because you can only check if the full input = something, not just any parts of the input and base the results on the combination of those, which is needed.

I'm also getting the same error when trying to install the demo. The application crashes just a few seconds after a "Verifying application requirements. This may take a few moments." screen has popped up and disappeared.

I hope you haven't been tearing all your hair out yet trying to work with annoying bugs like these. :) I'm running Windows 7 if that's of any relevance (but changing the app's compatibility mode doesn't seem to help though).

Thanks for sorting the download link, your mapping looks impressive and it feels to me you have the hang of making a good game... downloading right now!