WOODABA'S PROFILE

author=bicfarmer
Standard RPG. Story was more interesting than your run-of-the-mill dungeon crawler, but the writing, in particular the diction/word choices, were noticeably poor. Usually this involves using the wrong it's/its and repeating the same word within the same sentence. An example of that would be "I am once again glad to see you again" or something like that. It's very glaring. Some characters also change their tune way too suddenly to be believable.

Enemies were generally of medium difficulty, and so are bosses. I didn't have to use items at all. But fights were pretty repetitive, you cast sleep at the start of every battle and hope it sticks. Essentially this makes the game an RNG fest. The game also discourages saving, you have to walk long distances back to where you left off if you want to save, since the entire dungeon (not including the starting chapter) leaves you only one save point at the entrance which you can TP back to, but you have to walk back to where you left off. But that didnt really matter when I went up against a mob of 4 dark elementals, they decided to cast Darkness, whcih does 600 damage to the entire party, two of those and everyone dies. And I got unlucky when sleep only stuck on 1 of them, resulting in a party wipe on the second turn. And it turned out escape was 100% useless. So I rage quit because I lost half an hour of progress.

You really need to nerf that, seriously. 600 damage to the entire party, and the RNG dependency of the game. Some of the spells like cleave and paralysis are completely useless, I casted paralysis on a chimera and it gave him regen... just wow.

Thank you so much for playing the game and offering such detailed feedback! Sorry for not responding sooner, I've been very busy these past few months and haven't checked this website in a long time.

I'm currently working on another project now, but once that is done, I plan to release it alongside an updated version of Ashes, with a better script and redesigned systems.

Thanks again for playing, and I hope your negative experience with Ashes doesn't entirely put you off any future projects of mine.

First off, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the game. I can totally understand your frustrations with the game's battles: it sounds like you had a really tough time of it. I've had a fair bit of feedback so far and you're the first person to have experiences in that way, from the sounds of it, you may have had a run of just terrible luck, because the special moves have as pretty much as much chance of hitting as the regular attacks. Regardless, that absolutely shouldn't be happening, especially so early on, so your feedback is definitely going to be driving some rebalancing of the game's early encounters, and possibly even an implementation of an Easy Mode where you will recover fully after every battle. Hopefully that will mitigate frustrations.

I don't really want to "defend myself" in response to a review, that's terribly gauche and arrogant, but I will say that returning to save points to restore yourself was a deliberate design decision, I wanted to give the player the feeling that they were slowly penetrating the defences of this enemy, returning back to base to get resupplied. The rest of the stuff you encountered could be put down to balancing issues, but that one was a deliberate decision. Story Mode essentially negates that though, I designed Ashes to be the kind of game that appealed to me, like Vagrant Story and Wizardry, but I understand that not everyone finds those games fun, which is why Story Mode was implemented.

As far as the pauses go, I have noticed that on my laptop, RPGMakerMV games tend to run around 50% slower, especially when there's weather effects. You could be suffering from that? I don't think I made the pauses weirdly long.

If you're interested in the story, I would urge you to give it another go in Story Mode, as most of your issues seem to be with the combat and Story Mode cuts most of that out. The story was my main focus with this game and I'm still really proud of it If you're still interested in playing on normal mode, an updated version will be out tomorrow that will address the problems you've raised and some other minor issues.

Thank you for taking time out of your day to review the game! Any and all feedback you offer is instrumental in improving the game and my future games. If you ever go back to it, I hope you have a better experience.

author=HorrorBox
I like the tile sets, Can I use some of them for my own game? Where did you get the tile sets?

I got them as part of the Sci-Fi and Modern tileset on Steam. I think that's what it was, anyway.

author=argh
In the Cathedral first circle, the switch on the left: "We would have been content with but a ficker of the Lord's beauty..."

Interesting so far, by the way.

"The Door is Open" -- Dionaea House reference?

Edit: The Watcher's infodump after the Memoriam level has a misspelling: "ressurrect" instead of "resurrect". "You've made the right decision" is also cut off by the text window.

Thank you for your feedback! We have updated the program with new version that addresses these issues you have brought up, and others! The Author insisted we keep the class choosing the way it is, but aside from that, we hope the program is now of the quality we originally desired.

Additionally, we are delighted to inform you that the testers who neglected to report these issues have been euthanized. Thank you for your feedback!