EDIT: I love it, but the battles seem to take too long, maybe i'm just impatient XD Yeah, when you start out the battles can be a bit slow. They used to move a bit faster but that made it very hard for people to acclimate. After a few levels your speed picks up and battles go way faster. I'll see if I can find some way to speed them up without creating too much lag.
This looks pretty cool TDS. Downloading now~ Thanks, let me know what you think once you play it!
Love the concept and video! Will download soon! Thanks, hope to hear what you think soon.
@Amycha19:
Many people have already explained it far better than I could so I won't go on about why there are no walls of text. You are probably not going to like the game very much if you need a lot of information to get into it. The game does provide with the option to learn about a lot of things early on though and characters do each have a unique backstory.
For example, using the character you asked about:
(Don't read if you don't want spoilers)
The yellow bar story-wise is the power that he gets at the start, it does a lot of things. It increases your critical rate, cuts down damage, increases your speed and a lot of other things. It's length increases during the story, depending on whether or not you decide to help people or not.
It's not really meant to be spammed to get the battles to end, it's more of a thing for emergencies or learning about new enemies. For example if you see a new enemy and you're not sure how strong it is you can save your "Battle Rush" to help you escape faster if the enemy turns out to be too tough to take out. You can also use it to quickly take out lower level enemies once your levels are high enough.
Spoiler for Discussion point: Escape as a strategy in random battles :
You are not going to win all battles, odds are pretty high that if you don't learn when to leave you're just going to die. After battles whether you win or escape you "Rest" which gives you back some HP, use this to your advantage to conserve your items.I can see that this is a part of the strategy that's involved in surviving an encounter. And even though I read this part before I played the demo, it never actually crossed my mind to do so. In any RPG that's I've ever played, running away from a fight has never been an option unless forced. To me, a battle is a challenge that you are trying to beat and overcome and I try my best not to give up. This is what used to frustrate me in those old FF classic games that led you to a dungeon where enemies would just destroy you with no warning. Running away should be an option, not a necessity. And sometimes it can be a strategy, but its one that is best suited to tactical/strategy games rather than random battle orientated RPGs/games in general.
I do appreciate the strategy of escaping ("Live to fight another day" kind of thing). But in a game where the expectation on the player is to not have to run away, it would be at least an idea to tell players that the option exists and is a wise thing to keep in mind. There doesn't need to be a reward for it, because running away from a challenge should not be rewarding, but it should remind people that "Perhaps you need a bit more knowledge, or another approach, to overcoming this one". But, again, random battle games don't really favour the process of overcoming challenges. That's best left to boss fights and end game ventures. Whenever you came across a boss in an RPG and was unable to defeat them, you would level up and then try again. It's not as interesting as trying to teach re-evaluation and lateral thinking, but does have a similar essence underneath it.
The better games had some good mechanics involved, like FF7's materia system, that allowed you to try out different set-ups and approaches. I can see this game also having that element when you've got more party members and abilities, though I do worry that the pace of the battle system, and the lack of real interaction, will prevent a lot of players from being able to really analyse where they might be going wrong and figure out where to make changes.
If you speak to the NPC's around the castle they explain a lot of basic things such as keeping in mind escaping as an option. You are not really required to run away and if a person wants they could probably win every battle they encounter, but they would just end up wasting items and time on a battle too tough to win at the time.
As for a system to customize characters, I decided against it because the game is very short. That is why equipment is also removed, I can't keep adding systems that are really not going to have much of an effect in the game when each character already does.
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That said, I downloaded this demo and I liked it quite a bit (though I did die during my first battle)! The beginning cutscene is a bit long, but since you can skip cutscenes it really isn't an issue. The writing could use some polish, yes, but this game is far more about the mechanics, which are quite exciting (I loved the feel of Half Minute Hero). Thanks, and yeah a lot of people do die on their first battle. It helps a lot when it happens because they usually quickly learn to save often and use the cutscene skip command.
And yes, I do know my writing is nothing to write home about. If it gets too bad I'll see about finding someone to work with that can tackle writing better than me.
I'm liking the screenshots, I've always thought that if a scripter was to make a game, it'd probably have more features and usability than other RM games, looks like I'll get to find out on this one Let me know what you think once you've played it.
And thanks to everyone for posting! Have a nice day!