The back story is fairly solid. It's a standard theme that is present in over 90% of all stories you can tell: good guy(s) thwart the plans of the bad guy(s). But there's no obvious tie to the current story, so I'm not sure that we needed to really know about it. I can only assume that somewhere between then and now that seal has been broken and we're going to see the "revival" of said evil entity. I had expected, with the phrase "But the peace never lasts...", to be thrown straight into the chaos rather than going through the build up. I like to be gripped from the get go, personally, so I found it a bit slow to start. In fact, in that first hour, I never once got wind of something big about to happen. Just some rather strange, and frankly unbelievable, stuff about being sent on some quest by a very personal and amicable Queen Irene.
Rather than the intro scene relaying what happened in the back story, it might have been better to have us involved in seeing the reawakening of this demon. We can be told the back story along the way to fill in the gaps. I like a good mystery, so starting with only a bit of information and then working out the parts in between is appealing to me. It also gives us some extra insight into what the story is going to be about from the beginning. Then, when we are hooked, we can go through the relatively dull part of introducing the main hero(es) because we already want to see what happens next. Another way, is to do the good old fashioned "earlier that day/week" after seeing some intriguing mid-story event. It might be old fashioned, but it is a tried and tested method that does work very well.
Now, to explain why I find the start of this game a little unbelievable. It has something to do with a paradoxical character; Jules Bernard is a self-centred, narcissist who wants to be a noble and honourable knight who will protect his village? I have to ask, is there some personal reward that Jules is seeking for this to even be believable? An egotistical person does not do things for nothing, or to help others. They do things for personal gain. So, unless our hero has a hidden agenda we are not aware of (which I can't actually see from my initial impression of him in game) this description of him may need a little modifying. I can understand a cocky, over-confident, "I'm God's gift to Knights" persona that wants to prove to others and himself that he is just that. Perhaps over the course he mellows out and gains a bit of modesty, and here we have a believable character we will see change. Think Cloud from FF7 (which this character image seems heavily based on by the way). He starts off as a mercenary seeking only monetary gain by loaning out his skills. We then see him go on a journey of self-discovery and a personality change. This works for me. Your vision of Jules does not.
That's only some of the issues I have with the underlying concept behind the game. I have issues with the Queen character too. I'm not sure why she would want an obnoxious individual to represent her. And I'm not sure why she also sends 2 trained soldiers who actually help him (and let's Jules' friend tag along? I had no idea she had some other skill the Queen was fond of, so this seemed out of the blue to me). Either she would have sent her own soldiers if it was important, or she would have had the soldiers follow, but not assist, in the event things went wrong. To me, it looks like these characters were sent to attempt to balance out the battles - which are a little punishing at the start; 80HP max and the enemies hit for over 50% of that? I actually died when I went outside for the first time and 3 birds just ate my party. At about level 4 or 5, these become more bearable, so I would suggest raising the initial level a little and perhaps only have the 2 soldiers jump in to assist at a very much needed moment instead of straight away. We are, after all, being tested for our aptitude.
Touching on the graphical aspects: there's a few areas that I think could do with some work. It's most aesthetic more than anything. One is that some of the auto tile shadows don't actually show up where they should. I know that this is an engine side issue with VX. However, you can combat it by either tying a picture to areas affected to simulate the auto tile effect. Alternative, create some custom graphics and use events to fill it in. The second issue is in proportions. There's a house in the main village in the north that looks very small on the outside but looks huge on the inside. This I don't have a problem with, as I've seen it a lot in many old titles. However, because you include a view of the outside world, you can see how you've scaled the size of the house vertically, but not horizontally.
The obvious, final thing to note is that the characters really are too small. It actually made it uncomfortable to play. It looks as though the entire world was hit by dwarfism (no insult intended to people who have this condition) and they haven't gotten around to making their houses smaller. There was a scene in the intro where a person was out-sized by a cabbage.
I'm not a fan of whatever it is you are using to manage your BGMs. I had it crash on me mid battle and ended up with a looping sound playing over the other BGM. Not to mention it continued playing the BGM even after I shut down the game. I'm glad I figured out a way to shut it up quickly.
There's a few other things I noted, but I'll leave them out at the minute or I would go on for a while.
To close: after the one hour was up, I wasn't really interested in the story - whatever that actually was. I didn't see a reason to want to keep going, and I'd only keep going to offer more insight and to help with any bugs I'd find. Outside of testing it - in which my opinion on the game itself is very much irrelevant - I'm not too sure about it.
It's not the actual story itself, though, but rather the apparent randomness of events at the start that don't appear to offer much to the initial experience. Like I said earlier, those first 30 minutes are crucial in capturing the attention of the player. But even after an hour I wasn't captured. That very slow pacing is a bad thing for me. Once you've got the player, then you can begin to slow the pace down and drag them along for the ride.
Discord
Light Style