[PC][RPG] Legends of an Otherworld

[namida]

Using RPG Maker VX Ace, and since I'm no artist, I'm using default or freely-available graphics. The storyline is... well, not horrible (it's definitely no FFX-2), but it's nothing overly amazing either. The real shining point is the gameplay; the battles will give even good RPG players a run for their money.

The battle system is closely based off Final Fantasy 10, but the difficulty is... yeah, let's just say it puts FFX to shame and leave it at that. xD I'm sure you guys can at least partly guess from my Lemmings levels the sort of things I might come up with.

The first few bosses are more or less easy things to get you into it (though the 2nd and 3rd have been reported to give some people trouble), the 6th boss is where you really have to start thinking. =P

Map images. Spoiler-free.

Battle images. Spoiler-free.

Scanning can reveal useful information about enemies.

Blue magic works in a unique way. Instead of directly costing MP, you must charge BP and use that to cast it. The advantage is that Blue Magic is generally very powerful, or otherwise very useful.

Scanning can reveal status vulnerabilities too.

Battle video. Mild strategy spoilers for an early-game boss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuNp4d3EMhg

Note that as an early-game boss, this only shows a fraction of the various options available to you in combat. There's MUCH more to discover beyond this!

This game is now complete and is only being updated to fix bugs.

Current version: V026b
Fresh download: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Am6NTdy4vnPXhjBxJ5DdppjLWtil
Steam Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1252703211

It requires the RPG Maker VX Ace RTP, which you can get here: http://www.rpgmakerweb.com/download/additional/run-time-packages
Make sure you get the VX Ace one, not the standard VX one.

[ccexplore]

I have to say it's pretty decent and well made. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/thumbsup.gif" alt=":thumbsup:" title="Thumbs Up" class="smiley" /> It is very much in the overall style of the FF games back in the SNES era, great for the nostalgia factor.  Though I have to say I haven't seen the wraparound dungeons before in those games (granted, I'm not that big a player of RPG games), that is kinda innovative.

Interesting that the choice is made to make thing suddenly more difficult at the 6th boss, given all the discussion we've had around here about the diffculty curve in the original Lemmings levels (as in, these levels should've come before/after those levels, yada yada).  Seems like you're going for the opposite here then?

I know you said you don't visit here often, but I'm sorry, I'm not going to open a new account in some random board just to post about the game, so if I find any bugs or issues I'm just gonna post here.  Here's one:  see screenshot.  At the point in game when you're going up the mountains, if you talk to the boss characters (ie. the blond chick next to the white-hair dude) instead of to Harley (which would normally trigger the line of dialog leading to the boss battle), the game freezes.

======================

Since you brought up Android and iOS on another thread, I'm curious whether any free RPG makers out there currently provide cross-platform support particularly with mobile platforms such as at least Android.  You may well reach a much larger user base if people can download and play the game on those platforms as well.

[namida]

Just got GTA5 so playing that at the moment, but I did have a quick look at the code. There should be literally no difference - talking to Harley moves you to the space to the left of him, makes you face upwards (if you aren't already) then activates a switch. Talking to Brianna directly, since yu're already in that space and facing up, directly activates the switch. I'll have to have a closer look obviously.

The difficulty curve is fairly constant (with, just like in my Lemmings levels, the occasional extra-hard or extra-easy thrown in); it'd be more accurate to say the 6th boss is the first extra-hard one. However, more than half of the bosses before him also serve as somewhat of a test that you're getting the idea of the mechanics than meant to be actual challenges (though Craig + Brianna have been known to give people trouble). It can also depend on your playstyle - for example, at one point there's two bosses more or less in a row, we'll just refer to them with the initals DR and DT for here. Those who stay relatively low-level and rely extensively on strategy will have quite a hard time with DR due to his combination of punishing you for piling on damage too quickly (which a higher level party is more able to handle) and having Auto-Regen. On the other hand, brute forcing your way through DT is practically impossible; if your strategy is really bad he can even take down a Level 99 party, though that'd require you to be pretty bad... more realistically though, a player who has some understanding but isn't thinking much, DT would probably beat their Level 50-ish party. (Intended level for that point is around level 30, though I've done both of them at only slightly over half of that).

I don't know of any dedicated RPG Makers for mobile OSes. Multimedia Fusion 2 is a general game-making program that these days supports most platforms for output (including iOS, Android and even Xbox 360), but it's not free - and the compilers for anything other than Windows are an extra cost on top of the program itself. It's also not the best suited to RPGs, though it's most certianly possible to make.

I'm guessing you don't use Facebook either? The page there is generally the best way to contact me. But if not, just post it here, I do come here at least once in a while even at the times when I disappear for ages (I often don't post for like a year, but I still visit a few times througout that) so I'll see it eventually.

[ccexplore]

Thanks for the info.  I have spoilered the first boss that gave me some trouble (but I eventually did beat).  Sounds like a case of needing to level up more, or is that more or less how you expect this one to go?  (Unfortunately at this early point in the game, leveling up is pretty boring and grindy I have to say.)  Or did I miss a trick or two that would've made things go a lot smoother?

With the Transient, my party of 4 was originally at levels 7 and 8.  Eventually I raised their levels slightly to 8 (and 9 for the black mage characters, since it only took a small amount of additional EXPs after the other characters all hit level 8).  I also bought and equipped everyone with Agi+5% since the boss has higher agility and with its rather powerful attacks (and apparent immunity to almost all statuses except from the 4 "softening sand" given to you for this battle), I need my party to squeeze in as many turns as possible.  Even then, it is tricky when my party's HP hovers around 300s-400s (though thankfully one character is more like 600s)--the attacks being received easily takes out half the HP of the afflicted even with the best of preparation.

I had the two Sarin characters use their "stand ground" ability (counterattack) to increase damage potential especially when Trauma comes and everyone need to defend.  This works especially well as one of them has a regular physical attack which is the highest damage I can afflict, at slightly over 200 HP damage to the boss (and double that if I luck up on a critical hit).  Otherwise the black mage character deals out okay (and not status-dependent) damage with elementals at around 100 HP.  I also noticed that Phoenix Down revives a character to half his/her max HP, so in many cases it works out better to just let a single character (especially the one with highest HP) die and get revived.  With that in mind I stocked up a little on Phoenix Downs (Potions are plentiful with random battles right outside town at the swamps).

Ultimately I think the biggest source of difficulty is the high damage dealt, compare with the meager means I have for healing.  White mage's Cure can't target-all AFAIK, and that character isn't especially agile, so you really need Potions to deal with that big Trauma attack every 3 turns.  Potions heal only 75 compare with the 150+ damage from Trauma even with Defend.  And it's not like the shop (nor random battles) is offering better items like Potion Plus, so it isn't even a case of buying/stealing better items (yes, by that point you do pick up one or two Potion Plus and Elixirs, but I'd rather not use them so soon if I can).

At this early point in the game, there seems to be such a limited (and relatively crappy) selection of items, abilities and equipment, I think my options are just rather limited in how to deal with this battle, so it is challenging but not necessarily in a fun way for me.  I will grant you the possibility that maybe there is supposed to be a more specific pattern on how to attack the boss that might led to less damages received?  If such a magic sequence of moves exist I certainly haven't found it, beyond the general pattern to help you Defend for Trauma.

I do have to admit though, it is satisfying to beat the boss with all these things stacked against you.  I even manage to (barely) keep everyone alive at the final move so that all 4 can get their share of AP gains.

[ccexplore]

I have played through a few more bosses at this point (though I don't think I've yet reached the DR/DT point you mentioned), and I can definitely say that those bosses were easier to handle compare with that earlier "T" one I had trouble with.  Not easy mind you, but nowhere as unbalanced as the T battle.  Granted, I suppose occasional out-of-whack difficulties is intended and to be expected for your game.  I'm sure for example most people would get stuck at that dungeon where your options are math vs mapping out a maze (thankfully I know my math and much appreciate having that "shortcut" available), so maybe the extra difficulty of that early boss is a good warning anyway on what's to come. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/undecided.gif" alt=":-\" title="Undecided" class="smiley" /> http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/devil.gif" alt=":evil:" title="Evil" class="smiley" />  Still curious to know whether I was more under-leveled than intended for the T.

I ran into a few more (relatively minor) bugs as well, but it'd probably be more efficient if I wait until I finish the game before posting about them.

[namida]

He is quite a tricky one. While he CAN be beaten at even lower levels than you did at, I'm generally around the Level 9-10 mark for him (keep in mind I generally play RPGs, including my own, somewhat underlevelled), while others generally report being around level 12.

He does have one noticable weakness, though it's something that you'd have to resort to "try everything" to find due to his Scan immunity - kind of there as a reward to people who bother to do that (this isn't always the case with every boss, but some do reward you for trying obscure methods that might not be expected to work). Specifically in this case,

He is vunerable to Zombie - Tara and Leanna can learn Zombie Attack at level 15+, while Amanda can learn the spell Curse at any level. This allows you to use Harley's healing spells to deal some extra damage if you get spare turns. However - trying "zombie, elixir" to one-hit him won't work; he's immune to percentage-based damage (as are most bosses).

Beyond that, it's a matter of balancing attack and defence well, and taking care on where exactly you apply your healing. There's also...

one optional boss that can be fought before him (yes, I have these placed all throughout the game, not just towards the end), who drops a Hyperlixir (fully heals all members' HP and MP). This can be quite useful for that fight, though it's a very rare item so if you obtained it you may want to save it for later. By the time you're up to Transient, the optional guy isn't really that hard to beat.

[ccexplore]

I ran into a few more (relatively minor) bugs as well, but it'd probably be more efficient if I wait until I finish the game before posting about them.

Except I think I will mention now this bug I'm running into now rather than wait later, as it is frequently affecting me during my current point in the game, though perhaps others with different playing styles will be much less affected:  Escaping from a battle scrambles the party formation.  No big deal when there are no more than 4 members in the party, but once you hit 5 or higher, it means you end up with characters who aren't in battle swapped with those who are.  (For example, if current formation is A,B,C,D,E so that E is not in battle, after escaping out of battle back onto the map, you likely end up with something like eg. E,C,D,B,A [exact order likely depends on the exact order the characters escape with, I guess], so that A is no longer in battle while E is.

Since you can switch characters in-battle without sacrificing turns, I can live with this but it's an issue that can really get in your face.

[namida]

I'm aware of it, and it'll be fixed in the next major update, ie V018. (I generally only fix things that are either game-breaking or VERY simple in minor updates (017A, 017B etc).) Thanks for pointing it out all the same.

Just in case you hadn't realised, you can also re-order out of battle using the Formation option in the menu. Obviously not an ideal solution to be doing it after every battle, but it's at least there for before bosses.

That bug was unfortunately a side effect of the way I handled in-battle switching - or rather, fixing a glitch with Escape that got introduced when in-battle switching was added. Hence why it's not fixed in a very early version - the in-battle switching was only introduced in V016.

[ccexplore]

I found a few beneficial bugs in the meantime.  Due to their benefits to the player, I'm rather tempted to keep it all secret until I finish the game, but ultimately come to my senses and decide to mention them now in the same way that backroutes should not be kept secret from the level author.  I'll just finish the game without downloading any resulting updates (for now, unless there're new content). http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/devil.gif" alt=":evil:" title="Evil" class="smiley" /> http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/tongue.gif" alt=":P" title="Tongue" class="smiley" />

1) In-battle switching advances the character's status (eg. "Dark", "Silence") progression.  In other words, for statuses like "Dark" or "Silence" which are temporary and clear themselves after a few turns, you can simply in-battle switch the affected character back and forth a few times (~4-5 I think) and that would eventually result in the status removed, without losing the current turn at all (since you don't lose a turn by switching).  This effectively gives you a free way to cure those statuses.  Of course it doesn't work if the status is non-temporary.  Moreover, status like "poison" which regularly inflicts damage per turn, will inflict such damage during each in-battle switching as well.  I haven't tried "regen" status yet but I suspect it will likely behave similar, potentially giving you a free way to immediately and fully replenish your HP.

Of course, allies and monsters not involved in the switching are unaffected.

2) The stat boosts provided by Vince's special abilities (eg. Adrenaline, Meditate) will remain on the character post-battle (you can even see them in the menu screen outside of battle) if the character escaped during battle (either by "Escape" command or by Vince's "Flee" special ability).  On the other hand, if a character wasn't in battle when the battle ends (eg. you switched him out of battle, and then the battle ends by escape), he does lose those stat boosts he may have had during battle.  This is how I know one way or another, it is a bug and not intended.  The bottom line is that you can basically stat-boost up to 4 characters in your party before actually going into the next battle.  And yes, those boosts are saved (at least it look that way) when you save the game at a savepoint.

3) Arguable whether it is bug or just a sneaky trick intended for player to discover on their own, but because you can Escape from battle with an optional boss, if that optional boss has an item that can be stolen with Alicia's Theft ability, you can repeatedly steal and escape to get unlimited number of that item (until you defeat the boss of course or reach the max limit on number of items, or unless the boss is so quick and powerful, it kills your entire party after stealing without giving you any chance to escape).  In one sense, it's no different than the fact that you can do the same through random battles to accumulate such stolen items, so that's why I'm not convinced it should be called a bug.  On the other hand, the game (at the point I'm in so far, anyway) definitely depicts an optional boss as a singular character, unlike random battles where the monsters are presumably different members of the same species from battle to battle, and so it doesn't feel like you are stealing from the same entity with random battles.

[namida]

1) In-battle switching advances the character's status (eg. "Dark", "Silence") progression.  In other words, for statuses like "Dark" or "Silence" which are temporary and clear themselves after a few turns, you can simply in-battle switch the affected character back and forth a few times (~4-5 I think) and that would eventually result in the status removed, without losing the current turn at all (since you don't lose a turn by switching).  This effectively gives you a free way to cure those statuses.  Of course it doesn't work if the status is non-temporary.  Moreover, status like "poison" which regularly inflicts damage per turn, will inflict such damage during each in-battle switching as well.  I haven't tried "regen" status yet but I suspect it will likely behave similar, potentially giving you a free way to immediately and fully replenish your HP.

Of course, allies and monsters not involved in the switching are unaffected.

2) The stat boosts provided by Vince's special abilities (eg. Adrenaline, Meditate) will remain on the character post-battle (you can even see them in the menu screen outside of battle) if the character escaped during battle (either by "Escape" command or by Vince's "Flee" special ability).  On the other hand, if a character wasn't in battle when the battle ends (eg. you switched him out of battle, and then the battle ends by escape), he does lose those stat boosts he may have had during battle.  This is how I know one way or another, it is a bug and not intended.  The bottom line is that you can basically stat-boost up to 4 characters in your party before actually going into the next battle.  And yes, those boosts are saved (at least it look that way) when you save the game at a savepoint.

3) Arguable whether it is bug or just a sneaky trick intended for player to discover on their own, but because you can Escape from battle with an optional boss, if that optional boss has an item that can be stolen with Alicia's Theft ability, you can repeatedly steal and escape to get unlimited number of that item (until you defeat the boss of course or reach the max limit on number of items, or unless the boss is so quick and powerful, it kills your entire party after stealing without giving you any chance to escape).  In one sense, it's no different than the fact that you can do the same through random battles to accumulate such stolen items, so that's why I'm not convinced it should be called a bug.  On the other hand, the game (at the point I'm in so far, anyway) definitely depicts an optional boss as a singular character, unlike random battles where the monsters are presumably different members of the same species from battle to battle, and so it doesn't feel like you are stealing from the same entity with random battles.

1) Aware of it. Haven't fixed it yet, but it's known.
2) I've seen this happen on occasion, but never managed to link it to escaping (duh). Will look into a fix now that it's known.
3) I didn't exactly think of that, but it's not really a bug, more a case of intending mechanics working together in ways that weren't expected. There is one storyline boss where this is specifically averted (if you make a second attempt at fighting them, you get a far less useful steal item), but I never thought about it much for optionals. Still, there are only two which have really valuable steal items, one of which can't be escaped from.

Cerberus and Suzaku, the latter of which cannot be escaped from.

None of these are major enough to bother putting out a V017C update for (I generally reserve those for game-breaking bugs, sometimes with a few simple fixes added alongside them), they'll probably be fixed in V018, and that will add new content (all new number versions do). Probably quite a lot of it, too.

Where are you up to so far, by the way?

[ccexplore]

At the point after the graveyard visit in Corgent Temple, before returning to Saria.  I am of course taking full advantage of #3 in the meantime, as you may've guessed. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/winktounge.gif" alt=";P" title="Wink-Tongue" class="smiley" /> Regrettably while the item is useful, it doesn't sell well.

You praise the virtues of the battles, but actually I find the dungeon/puzzle designs to be just as good, and for me quite the highlight of playing the game (not that there's anything wrong with the battles, but I can usually get a similar effect in most RPGs by doing challenge-style plays like LLGs).  Granted, I haven't been playing RPGs for quite some time now so maybe the dungeon designs are not that unique or new compare with current games, but at least for me I find many of them clever, new and fun in your game so far. http://www.lemmingsforums.com/Smileys/lemmings/thumbsup.gif" alt=":thumbsup:" title="Thumbs Up" class="smiley" />

[namida]

Ah, you're two bosses away from DR and then DT then... =P Your taking advantage of #3 will help majorly against the latter; I find him impossible to beat at low levels without *some* form of Haste (whether it's the spell or items) for at least one or two characters.

Anyway, while as I said I'm not going to release a minor update to patch it, I've fixed the two escape-related bugs. Still got to fix the switching bug though (I had actually noticed this bug due to a slightly different effect of it - Poison/Regen damage will occur on switching. Same root cause.)

[Proxima]

I know this game hasn't been updated for a long time, but I'm working on an RPG Maker project, and I decided it would be a good learning experience to have another play through namida's game

Let's Play Curse of Saria!

[Dullstar]

@Proxima:

RPG Maker is always fun to use, but I'm soooo bad at actually finishing anything.

I haven't watched your playthrough, but if you're making your own project (I have no idea how much experience you have so you might already know this):

A tip: Either disable the ability to change the formation, or make sure to use it in testing. It's not unusual for people to forget that this option exists, and if you change the party leader, it can cause duplicate characters to appear in cutscenes (because many users will fail to take into account that the party leader can be any character within the party). It is fixable, but I don't quite remember exactly how to do it - it wasn't too complicated, though, and if you need this information I can look for a project where I made use of it.

Here's an example of this happening from one of my projects.

Spoiler

Also, when you have the project open in RPG Maker and launch it in the test mode, you can hold down control to pass through obstacles, which can be a nice time-saver. Before I realized this, I had several instances where I ended up getting stuck in places and wasn't sure why. Turns out I'd just bumped the control button.


This post is old, but it might still be useful information to someone:

Since you brought up Android and iOS on another thread, I'm curious whether any free RPG makers out there currently provide cross-platform support particularly with mobile platforms such as at least Android.  You may well reach a much larger user base if people can download and play the game on those platforms as well.

I don't know about free RPG Maker-type programs specifically, beyond the fact that at least one exists, but RPG Maker MV supports exporting to iOS and Android. I don't know if the support is any good, though.

[ccexplore]

Like many games I've played, at some point I apparently got distracted and never managed to finish even what partial content was available at the time, even though I clearly enjoyed playing it.

@Proxima: maybe you'll find it even more useful to see if namida may be willing to share to you some of the actual RPG Maker project files?  I imagine it'd be a little like looking at Lix's source code in addition to playing the game itself.

[namida]

I'm happy to do that if it'll be helpful (assuming I can find it), but be warned that it may be a mess.

[Proxima]

A tip: Either disable the ability to change the formation, or make sure to use it in testing. It's not unusual for people to forget that this option exists, and if you change the party leader, it can cause duplicate characters to appear in cutscenes (because many users will fail to take into account that the party leader can be any character within the party). It is fixable, but I don't quite remember exactly how to do it - it wasn't too complicated, though, and if you need this information I can look for a project where I made use of it.

No danger of me forgetting that in my project -- there are six available characters and the player chooses three to form their party, so I have to take into account that the party leader and followers may be any of the six characters.

@Proxima: maybe you'll find it even more useful to see if namida may be willing to share to you some of the actual RPG Maker project files?  I imagine it'd be a little like looking at Lix's source code in addition to playing the game itself.

Not really; I'm not looking at the game to learn how things are done, but to get a feel for what it's like to play through a game, what balancing decisions I agree with and what I'd do differently in my own game

[ccexplore]

@Proxima: do post your game (or a demo version thereof) here, or at least provide a download link, once it gets to that point.  I probably won't finish it but certainly wouldn't mind trying it for a few hours at least.

[namida]

One small hint that could be a lifesaver, Proxima: (spoiler tagged in case you dont' want hints)

Spoiler

I know you think it sounds useless, but the Sensor ability is possibly the most useful one in the game. It lets you see the order of upcoming turns, so you know when an enemy is about to attack, and even what impact the attack you choose will have on how quickly you get your next turn.

[namida]

To correct some misconceptions / overlooked features I've noticed so far (these are all either basic features that might not be obvious how to access, and are not spoilery or hinty; or stuff you've specifically brought up in your videos). Some of these I may have mentioned in comments on the videos.
- When viewing scan info for an enemy, you can press a key (shift, IIRC) to switch to viewing their status resistances. And (an NPC tells you this early in the game) if you try an element or status on them once, their weakness / resistance to that status becomes visible in their scan info, even if you haven't scanned them.
- You can move quickly between characters on the status, equip, etc screens, with whatever was the default key for this in RPG Maker - might be Z and X?
- Ivy's Learn -> Blue Magic shows a full list of blue magics that exist. Although do note that due to the game being incomplete, some of them are inaccessible.
- Luck doesn't affect status infliction. It affects the chance of not missing, and the chance of getting a critical hit. I can't remember if it affected Steal's success or not. It definitely doesn't affect statuses.

And one that is slightly spoilery (since you might want to figure this out for yourself, it's the kind of thing that could be figured out), but is still mostly just game mechanics:

Spoiler

I can't remember if it's all items, only the normal ones, or only Alicia's ones; but at least one kind of item (possibly both) have a 100% chance of inflicting any status effects they carry, even if the enemy has partial resistance. Only if they're completely immune will they fail. On the other hand, other skills or equipped abilities carry a set chance (often but not always 100%) but this is reduced by the enemy's resistance to the status, if they have any.

Now that I think about it, I have a feeling (but may be wrong) that Amanda's status spells work this way too.

Appreciate the comment on *spoiler, see below*. This was one of the boss fights I put the most effort into, glad to see it paid off.

Click to reveal which battle

2nd Craig + Brianna fight

And regarding Cube (not really a spoiler since it's an out-of-nowhere boss), you didn't break the fight, that was an intentional weakness.



Now, to comment on something of your storyline speculation. Although this part never got into the game (though parts do exist in the source, including several completely functional boss fights), it is hinted at a bit more later in the game, though nothing ever outright confirms it. Do note that this may also mean they're spoilers for a remake or completion of the game, if I ever do get around to either.

Actually spoilers for what was intended

Lunaris was actually intended to be the semi-final boss. Xeon was going to end up being the final boss (Yauwe and Tamiku having been defeated a little bit beforehand.)

All four boss fights are in the code, though Yauwe's and Tamiku's are only partially functional (Lunaris's and Xeon's are fully functional, as are two other boss fights leading up to them). A look at the source would suggest Yauwe's might even be complete and if not is at least close to it, while Tamiku's is not even close (she has all intended immunities, etc, but her only move is a physical attack).

[Proxima]

Is the following a bug or an intentional mechanic? I hope it's not intentional, because I am feeling very frustrated at this point.

Spoilers for Taspia portion of the game

In the third Craig and Brianna fight, Brianna can still cast after using Lena's Osmosis to deplete her MP.

[namida]

Spoiler

Yes, enemies' MP is only there for the purpose of draining it. It doesn't affect what they can and can't use. This mechanic was copied from Final Fantasy X, though I'm not completely sure how I feel about it now.

On one hand, it means that you can't cheap your way past enemies just by depleting their MP (counter-argument: a poor workaround exists in just giving them absurdly high MP; a neater one would be to provide them with ways to recover it while possibly also only applying the "needs MP" rule to human enemies), but on the other hand, it is contrary to expectations. I would only be okay with "some enemies work this way, some don't" if there was a very clear way to distinguish, such as the aforementioned humans vs monsters difference. I'd imagine the ultimate result of the game working this way would be much higher rates of unique-to-enemies skills that use no MP.

[namida]

I notice that the link in the first post was somewhat outdated, there was one further update since then. Although, this update just fixes one bug (albeit one that can be quite game-breaking, specifically, if you return to a certain area after completing the events there you can be unable to leave). Anyway, I updated the link. I also found a copy of the source code, so I put up a link to that too, as well as a few notes about a debug room that can be accessed via the source code version.

To those of you who have played this, I would be interested in seeing your overall feedback on what did or didn't work well, whether it relates to specific parts of the game or the overall system. While I don't know if it ever will happen, I am hoping to remake this game one day (with completely original assets, most likely including a custom-made engine even, and better writing etc), so any feedback that I could take into account for that would be great.

[Nepster]

You wanted feedback, so here it is. I noticed a few bugs in the current game, but as you plan to do a complete rewrite, I do not mention them here.
Overall it's pretty well-designed and has nice dungeons, random monsters and boss fights. So don't be frustrated should I sound overly negative in the spoilers.
And I tried to use relatively spoiler-free titles, while still giving enough information about when it is save to read this stuff.

General stuff that could be improved (almost no spoilers)

• Teach that scanning does give infos on resistances to statuses, too.
• Teach how to use the bombs and present packages. Looking under "Theft" isn't something very intuitive.
• Don't have long talks before a boss fight (especially the tough ones with Coda). If one has to repeat the fight, one isn't interested in the talk any more. So allow to go back and save between the talk and the battle.
• The enging sometimes demands more confirmation than necessary. Switch for example needs a confirmation, though it's a free action and one can undo it if necessary.
• Why is it impossible to flee from boss fights, especially the ones you can see coming? This only requires you to replay parts again or to backtrack often to save crystals. On the other hand, I feel that one shouldn't be able to escape from a Monster-in-a-Box.
• Some of the rarer random encounters could come more often. I never had the Treevil in the forest, or the Cuboid in the Haunted Manison, for example.
• It's pretty weird that you can stack a HP+10% and a HP+5%, but not two HP+10%.
• The messages from "Enemy has no steal item" and "Alicia just failed to get it" are the same. I would prefer to them being different. Proxima informed me that they are different. For some mysterious reason I never noticed that.
• A lot of items can only be sold by 1GP, which is annoying: Blue Magic learning items, Turbo Boost, Vampire Fangs, ...
• As Proxima already mentioned, enemies still casting while having no MP themselves is weird. Especially as this makes Osmosis pretty much useless.

Start until the Transient boss battle

Intro Area:
Works fine. The "Red means danger" hint isn't needed - let the player figure this out for themselves.
PHANTOM I: Relatively easy boss, but good as is.

Carialint:
The solid plants are annoying, because I cannor reliably separate them from non-solid ones.
I felt cheated that the very fast ghost has no impact on the story at all, even for later. That was disappointing, especially given the amount of work I put into talking to it.
The part ouside is a good challenge for a low-level party. But I would keep the missing bridge as part of the map. I took the end of the map as a hint that here comes a far more difficult part beyond, and first went to the north thinking this only to be a side-quest.
ERATICATOR: Good optional boss, but I would let the guard clarify that everything beyond him is totally optional. I took his warnings merely as "Do some preparation before coming here".

Fire-cave to Swamp:
The random encounters in the fire-cave felt too easy (while not being trivial). Similarly the swamp was quite easy: The Nom-plants didn't pose any problems and I almost never encountered the Swamp Soul (but even they were pretty weak).
CRAIG & BRIANNA I: Not a total push-over, but one of the easier boss fights.
MEGANOM: A good challenge, because you have to learn to ignore the two Nom-plants.

Nyatta:
There should have been a save crystal at the north end of the village. Currently one has to walk too much. The Alphas were interesting enemies, but the distinction between Ice, Thunder and Water could be clearer. It took my black mage two wrong tries to determine their elements.

Forest:
Nice labyrinth. The roaches are pretty hard and give less exp than other enemies, which are push-overs (once you know what they do).
SPIRIT: I don't really remember anything about this boss any more, so it was probably pretty straight-forward and nothing special.

Metaspe-Cave in forest & Transient:
Very good and fun enemies there.
PYRAMID: Easy, but probably intended as a intro boss. But I haven't up to now found any other boss changing their elements, so this into feels a bit weird.
TRANSIENT: I came there as level 8 and needed some grinding to level 9 to beat this boss, even though I already learned the breaker-attack for one fighter. One of the main difficulties is that the Trauma attack feels like a magical one, not as something doing physical damage. So it took a very long time for me to find out that I can reduce the damage by defending.

One more comment regarding the Transient fight: Someone mentiones directly before the fight, that the Weakening Sand is designed specifically for the Transients. That let me believe for a long time, that no other enemy is affected by Weaken and Meltdown. So you might reformulate that part a bit.

Saria until the Returner boss battle

Saria:
Nice layout of Saria. The parting with Amanda felt like I would reunite with her pretty soon, so I left her pretty good abilities, which I missed later on. The palace is nice, but I wish I could explore it even after talking to Cameron. So perhaps the Flunky fight could only be triggered when trying to leave the whole palace?
Just out of curiosity: What does the shady character sell here?
FLUNKY: An extremely hard fight, given my relatively low level (and no way really to grind levels in Saria). This felt like I was using half of my turns just to revive someone.

Metaspe escape route:
The bowling maze is very nice, the calculator a good idea. Even though I got the basic idea pretty soon, I was totally stumped, because every green operator button recalculated the number. This was totally unexpected, so I aborted the idea, until the guy confirmed it again. I am not so fond of the sand area afterwards: I have no clue at all what the red button does and the Monster-in-a-Box is so hard, that I had to replay the area again. And I am still stumped about how to get to the other side of the chasm at the Monster-in-a-Box.
Given that one is transported to this area rather unexpectedly, I would have liked some kind of basic tool shop in the area (with items being twice as expensive), e.g. the girl just outside the prison.
The random encounters could be slightly harder. The Dainu, Careter and the Minigon are push-overs, only the Eyepod is any danger.
ILLUSIONA: Very tough batte, especially due to the party sleep attack. Nice challenge.
CUBE: Great boss, because of the totally unexpected way of attacking.
CEMEO (Monster-in-a-Box): Very hard encounter due to the instant-death attack. I only got past it with Alicia's help.
CRAIG & BRIANNA II: I know, you consider this to be one of the best fights, but I considered it pretty stright-forward: Just keep Brianna silenced.

Yuvia:
The way to Yuvia is pretty neat, but the random encounters are rather difficult. You basically have to know in advance what each enemy can do to beat them. But that's fine with me. The only major annoyance was the Bloob: At that point one has only pretty weak magical attacks and Ivy needs to cast more than 10 times to take it down, with noone else being able to do anything else. It would have been much better with only a third of its current HP.
The library wasn't much fun, because one NPC mentioned he lost some item in it, which caused me to check on each book shelf, but didn't find anything.
GANGSTER: This was pretty easy, as Darkness and Sleep lets you basically take them one-by-one.
BEN: I was probably underleveled at that time, so this was an extremely tough fight. After a few tries I got lucky and got Ben killed with just 4 HP left over. It would have been nice to add Alicia to the whole party first to properly prepare her. Like this I had to remove all the abilities from all other members, and apply them again afterwards.

Gobbie-Cave:
Very nice dungeon. But the Exp-values of the random enemies are way off: Obbies are pretty easy, Accras almost surely kill one character and are pretty hard, the roaches here are still extremely nasty, but the Spellpot is laughable (just use one Silence attack on it). But then the Spellpot gives very nice items and a ton of Exp. It would feel much more deserved, if it had a special action healing Silence.
GREAT OBBIE: The worst boss I have encountered up to now. The first two thirds are trivial, then there comes a brief interesting part with Plague and lots of status effects. And then the Desaster, wiping out the whole party.

Spoiler for a later battle - read only after a pentagon turned into a tool shop

Given that one has to know the Zombie-Deadly Rain combo later on, I would prefer that this boss uses Deadly Rain pretty early (as it already casts Zombie often) instead of Desaster at the end, and then starts with the status effects much earlier.

Nyatta - Transients revisited:
I was at level 12-13 at this point and had no troubles with the main fights. In fact the random encounters were much harder and took much longer, because the Minosients have a ton of HP and one cannot deal much damage per turn. I had Enemy Repel put on almost the whole dungeon, which I do only rarely.
After all this, I noticed the direct transport to Carialint. But it would be a lot more useful it went directly to the Eraticator rock.
TRANSIENT: Pretty easy this time. I always got the transient killed before it got to cast Trauma.
RETURNER: Very interesting battle mechanic, which needs a very counter-intuitive strategy:

Spoiler for a later battle - Read only when you have figured out the precise mechanics of this fight

To attack only when it counter-attacks (and once with Harley during every time it's storing energy).

Saria again until the DT boss battle

Way to Saria (second visit):
Ok, here is a HUGE difficulty spike, both with the new Phantom and the random encounters afterwards (and their instant death attacks). I tried it once, got badly mauled and then decided to do some grinding with the whole parts. I went from level 12-13 to 17-18. With these levels, I felt I was actually a bit over-leveled, because the optional boss was pretty easy, even though the random encounters were still challenging. I didn't like the invisible maze, even though its layout was good.
PHANTOM II: Very nice the in-between taunting that Silence no longer works. I found the weakness, but had only one bag to inflict Darkness and no other way. So I had to backtrack to Nyatta to get some more.
HELLFIRE: After realizing that defeating the smaller ones isn't going to help at all, this was easy. Alicia had the bility "Counter-Attack" at that moment, so the small ones got frequently removed without me doing anything, which helped a lot.

Way to Haunted Mansion:
The way itself is nothing special, but the random encounters are pretty neat, though not overly difficult. I only wish the Soulcluster would be more dangerous - after all one gets warned about the dark grass and then it's one of the easiest enemies around there. The Deadhead though is an extremely interesting random encounter and was a lot of fun to best. Note that I wasn't yet strong enough to fight it head-on (pun intended), so I had to study it rather well and then be pretty sneaky: Casting only Light and healing spells on it, to avoid the draining counter-attack.
ENCHANTER: An extremey easy boss. I targeted the man right away and was surprised when it got down and I didn't even got a chance to steal from it. I only learned about the element-changing nature from Proxima's video - it never changed any colors when I played it.
TOROPHO: Very neat boss, even though the Torando is extremely powerful. Unfortunately I never got it down completely with Split Attacks before it casts Tornado, so I had to pool all my HP+ and DEF+ on Ivy, and revive the other party members afterwards.

Haunted Mansion:
My favorite is the first room with the question, especially the third one. Only of the last two rooms, I am not so fond of. But I would allow doing the rooms in an arbitrary order (perhaps only forcing the bottom one to be the third one).
The randon monsters are fun to battle with, while not a real danger to my party. Btw, I almost never used Lena for this part, even though she was by far the most powerful character here.
That Alicia leaves the party is very annoying, just to come back right away. I took away her abilities (fearing a similar incident as with Amanda previously), just to have to give them back...
CRAIG & BRIANNA III: Very hard, but extremely clever battle! Here comes the power of the Zombie attack on a regenerating character...
ENTITY: Pretty nice battle, but not really hard (which is good for such an surprising boss encounter).
CULT MAGE: Extremely easy battle, as they are all vulnerable to darkness, silence, ...
FRAGMENT: This boss needs some preperation against the fire, so the Coda monologue is annoying. Otherwise a nice battle, but not as remarkable as Craig&Brianna fight before. I managed to inflict Silence and Darkness, so I got the feet attack every time, which Ivy could heal well enough.

Ice Temple:
One of the best dungeons I played so far: The puzzle is very sneaky and satisfying to solve, while the encounters are interesting. The snowflakes could be more visible against the background and the Sapphire Dragon if far too easy for a dragon.
SARIAN SOLDIER: I don't remember much of this fight. I guess inflicting status effects made it pretty stright-forward.
ICE ELEMENTAL: Having gotten enough ice resisting abilities, this wasn't much of a roadblock. I wonder whether casting water attacks, would make this fight more interesting?
CERBERUS: I couldn't take him while around level 22-23, but once I got past the Dark Transient and was level 27, it went surprisingly smooth. Having bought several Omni Resists helped.
CRASH ENGINE: Only here I learned that Breaker Attack isn't just useful for Transients, and that only because I got frustrated an tried anything to get a bit more damage out of my characters. Otherwise a very nice and surprising battle.

Saria during the Cult Attack:
Great change of atmosphere! The random encounters here are pretty boring and only annoying, though. I was slightly disappointed that after a long way to the bottom left corner, there was nothing there at all.
When I got to the second boss fight, I saw that my levels were far too low and I went back to the ice cave and leveled from 22-23 to 26-27.
DARK ILLUSION: Nice fight, entertaining at that time, but nothing exceptional.
DARK RETURNER: Much harder than the first Returner, because you need to store a lot more damage to avoid the more damaging alternative spell. With level 26-27 things went very smoothly, especially as I had Haste now.
DARK TRANSIENT: This requires the "Zombie counters Dark Rain" knowledge, which I didn't have and namida had to tell me. This is especially frustrating, because one would expect that the recently aquired Death Resist abilities would work at least partially here.
And even given this knowledge, the fight was very tough, because one becomes a zombie at the beginning (and has to use Relics to heal it), then has to survive Trauma (for which I had to heal the members fully before defending), and afterwards let Harley inflict Zombie on himself (using Zombietouch) and swap out all other active party members. The last part is needed, because at that point I finally managed to cast Haste on everyone, which would be removed during resurrection. So Deadly Rain kills everyone, except the Zombie-Harley, who uses Phoenex Dust to revive the other party members, who at 1HP swap the hasted ones back in. After that the remaining fight is relatively easy.

The Guardians, the Flashback, the Hunting club and the Icy Caves

From here on, I no longer have Proxima's videos to remind me of every boss, so I might forget to mention some of them.

Becoming a Guardian:
I liked the difficulty of the random encounters here. They were pretty tough, but that's good.
PHANTOM III: This felt easier than the previous Phantom battle. Don't remember much about this fight.
ENDURANCE TEST: Ok, I made the mistake and not read the intro text a lot, so I tried to hurt it and quit after a few rounds. Once I realized my mistake, this became pretty easy.
POWER TEST: This was a lot of fun, even without much strategy in there.
KNOWLEDGE TEST: I didn't like this one. I am still wondering what the "Use something that affects different enemies differently" is, because in my opinion almost all attacks work like this. That some question (even correctly answered ones) pop up multiple times is weird.
STRATEGY TEST: I suspect, I should have used the Sneaky Powder, but I cannot prevent the boss to cast Infection. So I found out that the item Poison Dust works as well (despite the intro text), even though it gets healed (not treated via infection) and so has to be applied multiple times. Because I only had one of them, I had to backtrack all to Nyatta to get some.
AISHA: A fun battle without any specific strategies. It wasn't too hard.

Sturges (Flashback):
Very nice dungeon at general layout.
GRIELLO: Very unintuitive solution, by not casting Regen on one-self but on the enemy. Then one just has to defend...
SASHA & RIVA: Another very clever battle, having to kill both directly after another to avoid their Phoenix Tears. Having to steal the Haste and Shield statuses is a nice touch, too.
The encounters at the normal time, especially the ones in the sand cave proved far too difficult for my party, so I decided to do some grinding to level 28-29 afterwards.
I went into the deep sand cave with the ability "No Encounters" put on, but got stuck there. A lot of stuff like the red crystals, the pentagon next to it or the blocking white crystal didn't do anything. And the hints Alicia translated didn't make sense, too. I will have to try this again later on.

Hunting club:
Nice idea, but the areas are too large for my taste. A bit more texture to the landscape would be nice, e.g. a lake or similar.
The random encounters are nice at first, but the rare encounters are too rare. Moreover the random encounters have almost no useful steal items (except for the Water Blob). So I did a lot of fleeing to avoid over-levelling.
DRACULINA: This was surprisingly easy due to the status effects I managed to inflict.
REAPER: This needed a ton of preparation, because again the Death Resist abilities don't work and the Seal action is just sooooo powerful. Alicia had Light Touch and attacked always, Amanda did always cast Light, Leanna constantly revived Harley and Harley casted Haste on other members whenever alive. This way Harley got sealed dead only at the very end of the fight. 
Unfortunately there is a bug, that defeating Reaper is not always remembered, so I had to do this fight twice.
I did not go further to the Mayae Temple yet, because I felt I did enough of levelling up.

To the Ice Temple:
I decided to start from the west. The random encounters were nice, though became almost trivial once I got Tara past level 30 and leaned the Slash-All attack, which together with Darkstrike, Slowstrike and Sleepstrike it just too powerful. Then I went down the east path, before exploring further up. Only once I reached the upper caves with the Cave Gobbies, I got challenged again, though the Creepers and Deshells fall still to Tara's attack.
GOLEM: Sorry, but this was easy and boring. The Golem got it's strength reduced, the party members got Haste and Vince's upgrades and then everyone just physcially attacked the golem until the deed was done.
FISH-WARRIOR: This was quite a tough fight, because all my lovely status attackes proved to be useless. Nice challenge.
PHANTOM IV: Harley just learned Regen, so this fight was almost trivial for me.
CRAIG & BRIANNA (Zombie edition): This is exceedingly difficult, even for my party of level 34. I probably made the mistake not to learn Dispel for Harley, so I have no way to remove the Haste state. While I can completely avoid Brianna's spells for three party members, a hasted Craig (even with Darkness) manages to kill them easily.

I decided to go back and try either the sand cave or the Mayae Temple at this point, to allow Harley to gain enough AP to learn Dispel.

My current party

For the records, here my party attributes and items at the moment. The abilities usually get modified for tough boss battles.
Tara: Level 34, HP 1777, MP 139
  Str 58, Def 43, Mag 18, Spr 28, Agi 42, Luc 16
  Platinum Aycara, Str+10%, Sleepstrike, Slowstrike, Darkstrike
  Dark Attack, Silence Attack, Magic Buster, Spirit Buster (bad choice), Stand Ground (bad choice), Slash-All

Leanna: Level 33, HP 1646, MP 155
  Str 85, Def 42, Mag 14, Spr 50, Agi 62, Luc 15
  Diamond Aycara, HP+25%, Str+10%, Multi Resist, Sensor
  Silence Attack, Breaker Attack, Strength Buster, Vampire Attack (bad choice), Split Attack, Stand Ground (bad choice), Quick Attack

Harley: Level 36, HP 1647, MP 336
  Str  8, Def 41, Mag 68, Spr 66, Agi 24, Luc 21
  Sapphire Emblem, HP+25%, Agi+25%, Half MP Cost, Multi Resist
  Cure, Revive, Esuna, Esuona, Haste, Aura (not yet as useful as I hoped), Regen, Scan

Amanda: Level 35, HP 1570, MP 582
  Str 15, Def 34, Mag 57, Spr 55, Agi 34, Luc 15
  Cursed Staff, MP+100%, HP+25%, Mag+25%, Omniproof
  L1 Elemental A, L2 Elemental B, L3 Elemental B, Osmosis (bad choice)

Ivy: Level 29, HP 2153, MP 78
  Str 37, Def 77, Mag 56, Spr 64, Agi 65, Luc  8
  Gold Crown, Slowtouch, Poisontouch, Deathtouch, Alchemy

Alicia: Level 34, HP 1376, MP 29
  Str 89, Def 24, Mag 67, Spr 23, Agi 69, Luc 27
  Slow Shuriken, Str+25%, HP+10%, Luck+25%, Auto-Shield

Vince: Level 36, HP 1611, MP 40
  Str 50, Def 71, Mag 18, Spr 69, Agi 39, Luc 20
  Terra Orb, HP+10%. Str+10%, Def+25%, Spr+25%
  Flee, Faith, Purify, Adrenaline, Medidate, Accel

Other Abilities:
Str+10%, Def+10%(2), Spr+10%, MP+25%
Light Resist(2), Dark Resist(2), Omni Resist(3)
Iceproof(2), Waterproof, Darkproof
Firedrain, Icedrain, Lightningdrain, Waterdrain, Lightdrain
Fire Touch(4), Ice Touch(5), Water Touch, Light Touch, Dark Touch
Darkness Resist, Zombie Resist(6), Psycho Resist, Death Resist(3)
Poisonproof, Silenceproof, Sleepproof
Darktouch, Silencetouch, Sleeptouch, Zombietouch
Auto-Reflect
Counter Attack, Magic Counter, No Encounters, Debuff Resist
Defence Trainer, Spirit Trained (equipped to whomever levels up next)

[ccexplore]

It's been a while since I played this, so I probably won't provide any feedback now unless I get the chance to replay it again, likely from beginning (though I also have the option to play from the backup files correspond to whenever's the last time I touched the game).  I will say though that skimming through Nepster's "general stuff", at least a few points he mentioned are stuff I kind of took for granted based on experiences with other RPGs, so I guess the feedback will likely also depend on which other RPGs the player has played previously.  Of course, just because it's "normal" (or perhaps a better term would be "conventional" as in following the "usual" conventions of these kinds of games) doesn't mean it has to be slavishly accepted.

stuff on Nepster's "general" list that I assume is normal

• Why is it impossible to flee from boss fights, especially the ones you can see coming?
• Some of the rarer random encounters could come more often. I never had the Treevil in the forest, or the Cuboid in the Haunted Manison, for example.
• A lot of items can only be sold by 1GP, which is annoying: Blue Magic learning items, Turbo Boost, Vampire Fangs, ...

More generally I've expected that most bosses are immune (or at least highly resistant) to certain "cheap-ish" maneuvers that would otherwise work on most random-encounter enemies, for example percent-based damage that eg. takes out half of target's remaining HP, and escape would certainly be something I expect to fall under "haha, nice try but it's a boss".

I don't remember the specifics of item costs, but if an item is not generally available for sale (ie. your characters can buy them) in a shop, I do expect that many would not be valuable to sell back for GP either.  Items that are available for sale in a shop I usually expect maybe sold back at 1/3 to 1/2 of bought price (or something like that, it's possible memory fails me and they usually sell back for much cheaper).  That said, I also do believe that in many RPGs, there are certain types of items that simply are not valuable to sell even if they may cost you much GP to buy from a shop.

The MP thing I'm on the fence.  One important detail that needs some clarification:  is the enemy's remaining MP ever revealed through any kind of scan-like capability?  I think it's somewhat reasonable to expect that enemies may have completely different mechanism for their attacks from your characters, so that an enemy attack may look or feel magical but does not actually involve MP consumption.  (Though preferably, they should not look and be named exactly like a player-character attack that does cost MP.)  It would definitely be very weird if you are able to observe an enemy making a move that consumes their MP, and yet the move can still be made even after their MP has been depleted completely.  But based on what's said that doesn't sound like the case, instead it sounds more like people were expecting certain enemy attacks to be MP-consuming when in fact they are not.

Either way, maybe it's better that if an enemy's moves don't involve MP consumption, perhaps they should just have 0 MP to start with.  And maybe have someone in the "battle tutorial house" make some sort of remark about enemies having magic-like abilities that don't consume MP, to set expectations upfront.  Having more consistent conventions (like the human vs non-human thing namida suggested) would likely also go a long way in making this aspect less jarring.

[Proxima]

Reply to ccexplore

Blue Magic items are bothersome since a second item for a BM you've already learned has no use, and clogs up your inventory unless sold. I don't mind it selling for only 1 Kx, but it would be nice if you could just "use" it to consume it. However, giving it a higher selling price would make it worthwhile to go for more steals, so I can see where Nepster's coming from on that one.

Enemies' maximum and current MP is visible with Scan, yes. And the probably specifically with the Craig & Brianna 3 fight (the one where I tried this as a strategy for winning the fight) is that Brianna casts magic that's available to your party (e.g. Haste) and costs you MP, so it's reasonable to expect it would cost her MP.

It would also have made the fight more enjoyable than it actually was, since the actual solution made Brianna die very quickly.

[namida]

Feedback on above. I'll just spoiler tag the whole thing, but I'll split it into two - one for up to where Proxima's up to (based on latest video, which is currently part 19), and the rest up to where Nepster's up to (which is at, but not past, a boss fight against two undead enemies - I think only one such boss fight exists so this should identify it).

Spoilers up to these respective points will not be further marked, including those that are gameplay mechanic spoilers rather than story ones. Any spoilers beyond those points that are brought up within the tags, will be spoiler marked as nessecary.

Up to Proxima's current point

Nepster's general feedback

Teach that scanning does give infos on resistances to statuses, too.
Teach how to use the bombs and present packages. Looking under "Theft" isn't something very intuitive.
Don't have long talks before a boss fight (especially the tough ones with Coda). If one has to repeat the fight, one isn't interested in the talk any more. So allow to go back and save between the talk and the battle.
The enging sometimes demands more confirmation than necessary. Switch for example needs a confirmation, though it's a free action and one can undo it if necessary.

Agree on all four of these.
For the third one, I'm not sure what would be the best way to achieve this; putting an interruption where the player can backtrack and save feels like it breaks the flow of the scene. Perhaps a "skip cutscene" option is the best solution.
The last one is basically a side effect of trying to force RMVXA's engine to do stuff it was never intended to be able to do.

Why is it impossible to flee from boss fights, especially the ones you can see coming? This only requires you to replay parts again or to backtrack often to save crystals. On the other hand, I feel that one shouldn't be able to escape from a Monster-in-a-Box.

I'm actually surprised to hear monster-in-a-box is escapable, I would've thought it'd be the kind of thing I wouldn't make escapable. Not being able to escape from bosses is fairly standard for RPGs.

Some of the rarer random encounters could come more often. I never had the Treevil in the forest, or the Cuboid in the Haunted Manison, for example.

I could swear the Treevil occurs as a monster-in-a-box. It was intended that some encounters are extremely rare, though.

It's pretty weird that you can stack a HP+10% and a HP+5%, but not two HP+10%.

I think for the most part, it makes sense that you can't stack abilities. The +??%s are a special case where maybe it doesn't make sense, but imagine being able to stack four HP+100%s... (yes, those exist, at least in the code; not sure if any are accessible in-game). It would be a total gamebreaker if the enemies weren't adjusted for the possibility, and basically just reduce it to "grind until you can afford four of them for every character" if the enemies were adjusted for it - unless they just became extremely reliant on proportional damage attacks, which isn't ideal either.

A lot of items can only be sold by 1GP, which is annoying: Blue Magic learning items, Turbo Boost, Vampire Fangs, ...

This is a fairly standard RPG mechanic. The idea is basically "you can get rid of them if you want to, but you won't make money off them". Perhaps this could be removed (and the items just made unsellable) with the addition of a way to simply discard unwanted items. Although... (game mechanics spoilers which neither Proxima nor Nepster would be aware of yet)

Spoiler

At level 30 Alicia can learn an ability "Mix", which can use any two items (excluding equipment and rare items). Of course, some are more useful for this than others.

As Proxima already mentioned, enemies still casting while having no MP themselves is weird. Especially as this makes Osmosis pretty much useless.

Yes, this is something I think needs reconsidering. There are both things I do like and things I don't like about this system. Osmosis isn't completely useless though - it can be very useful if you need to top up some MP. This is somewhat negated by the frequency of save crystals, which also recover your party. My thoughts on how to deal with this: Allow saving everywhere, make the crystals rarer and solely for recovery - and perhaps either a limited number of uses, or have a "recharge" period between uses. (I did also consider the idea of removing them altogether in favor of just making Tomes a bit more common, but the difference is that Tomes can be used anywhere (as long as it's outside battle), whereas a healing crystal would only be in one specific place.)

Nepster's segment-by-segment feedback

Works fine. The "Red means danger" hint isn't needed - let the player figure this out for themselves.

Even with this hint, some people have been unable to figure it out. :/

The solid plants are annoying, because I cannor reliably separate them from non-solid ones.

Agree.

I felt cheated that the very fast ghost has no impact on the story at all, even for later. That was disappointing, especially given the amount of work I put into talking to it.
ERATICATOR: Good optional boss, but I would let the guard clarify that everything beyond him is totally optional. I took his warnings merely as "Do some preparation before coming here".

These are good points. Though I do like to put in things that seem relevant but aren't, just to keep the player on their toes. But this ghost was probably a bit excessive.

CRAIG & BRIANNA I: Not a total push-over, but one of the easier boss fights.

This is not a common reaction to this fight, if anything, common feedback is that it's too hard (though I personally think it's just right).

There should have been a save crystal at the north end of the village. Currently one has to walk too much. The Alphas were interesting enemies, but the distinction between Ice, Thunder and Water could be clearer. It took my black mage two wrong tries to determine their elements.

Regarding the save crystal, that would become irrelevant with a save-anywhere system. Agree that the Alphas could use more visual differentiation.

PYRAMID: Easy, but probably intended as a intro boss. But I haven't up to now found any other boss changing their elements, so this into feels a bit weird.

Illusiona, Enchanter and Dark Illusiona can also change their elements (though since elemental spells aren't the only practical way to damage them, nor is attention drawn to it, it isn't as noticeable). It isn't particularly common, but Pyragon is not unique in having this ability.

TRANSIENT: I came there as level 8 and needed some grinding to level 9 to beat this boss, even though I already learned the breaker-attack for one fighter. One of the main difficulties is that the Trauma attack feels like a magical one, not as something doing physical damage. So it took a very long time for me to find out that I can reduce the damage by defending.

One more comment regarding the Transient fight: Someone mentiones directly before the fight, that the Weakening Sand is designed specifically for the Transients. That let me believe for a long time, that no other enemy is affected by Weaken and Meltdown. So you might reformulate that part a bit.

Beating it at level 9 is quite an achievement; even my personal best isn't much lower than that (and keep in mind I know (or at least, knew at the time) every vunerability it has, every detail about it's attack pattern, everything that could be obtained nearby that might help, etc).
I see where you're coming from that Trauma looks like a magical attack, though it is explicitly pointed out by one of the party members that it's physical and that Defend can reduce it (and that Pulse is magical and Defend will not work, for that matter).
Regarding the Softening Sands, I see your point there, especially since this is the first time Weaken and Meltdown are seen by most players.

Nice layout of Saria. The parting with Amanda felt like I would reunite with her pretty soon, so I left her pretty good abilities, which I missed later on.

Yeah, I get what you mean here. I'm thinking the best solution is, rather than offering an option to remove them when someone leaves, just allow reconfiguring them even when they're absent. (This does seem a bit weird - how can you unequip something from a member half way across the world then immediately equip it to someone with you - but I think it's an acceptable break from what makes real-world sense.)

The palace is nice, but I wish I could explore it even after talking to Cameron. So perhaps the Flunky fight could only be triggered when trying to leave the whole palace?

Yeah, I could see that working with a few adjustments. Although the downside would be - if you were to save inside the palace, there'd be no access to recovery points or shops.

Just out of curiosity: What does the shady character sell here?

I don't remember exactly what it is, but in general, they sell very good abilities; I recall one of the very early ones selling Auto-Haste but I don't remember which one it was.

FLUNKY: An extremely hard fight, given my relatively low level (and no way really to grind levels in Saria). This felt like I was using half of my turns just to revive someone.

Did you pick up on his pattern?

Spoiler

He alternates between using Radar (single-target version) and a strong physical attack. The physical attack always targets whoever he just used Radar on, unless they've been knocked out in the meantime (which would only happen by you attacking yourself). So, you can have that character Defend.

The bowling maze is very nice, the calculator a good idea. Even though I got the basic idea pretty soon, I was totally stumped, because every green operator button recalculated the number. This was totally unexpected, so I aborted the idea, until the guy confirmed it again. I am not so fond of the sand area afterwards: I have no clue at all what the red button does and the Monster-in-a-Box is so hard, that I had to replay the area again. And I am still stumped about how to get to the other side of the chasm at the Monster-in-a-Box.

You and Proxima are actually the first people I know of to figure out the calculator puzzle.
The red button, I'm not sure off-hand if it actually does anything. It might be that it unlocks the optional side room, the next actual room, or a path to a treasure chest. But knowing me, it could indeed also be that it literally does nothing.
I don't think the other side of that chasm is accessible. It might be possible to come into that room on the other side from somewhere else later (I don't remember for sure), but it isn't possible to cross it IIRC.

Given that one is transported to this area rather unexpectedly, I would have liked some kind of basic tool shop in the area (with items being twice as expensive), e.g. the girl just outside the prison.

Yeah, a shop there is probably a good idea.

The way to Yuvia is pretty neat, but the random encounters are rather difficult. You basically have to know in advance what each enemy can do to beat them. But that's fine with me. The only major annoyance was the Bloob: At that point one has only pretty weak magical attacks and Ivy needs to cast more than 10 times to take it down, with noone else being able to do anything else. It would have been much better with only a third of its current HP.

Yeah, this is a major difficulty spike that comes out of nowhere. I think the difficulty here needs to be toned down a bit. Regarding the Bloob though, do keep in mind that it's not intended that every random encounter is reasonable to take on the first time you get somewhere - this is why the Escape option is pointed out at the start of the game, and again when Vince joins.

GANGSTER: This was pretty easy, as Darkness and Sleep lets you basically take them one-by-one.

Yeah, this is meant to be a somewhat easy fight if you remember to use status effects.

Very nice dungeon. But the Exp-values of the random enemies are way off: Obbies are pretty easy, Accras almost surely kill one character and are pretty hard, the roaches here are still extremely nasty, but the Spellpot is laughable (just use one Silence attack on it). But then the Spellpot gives very nice items and a ton of Exp. It would feel much more deserved, if it had a special action healing Silence.

To be honest, I don't feel the EXP / AP balancing in this game is very good at all. It needs significant reworking. Though I think a significant factor here is that the dungeon wasn't intended to be taken on when it's first available. So, the enemies "level" is higher, which in turn means lower-level characters gain a lot of EXP from them - whereas AP is "max X, and this decreases slowly if you're above the enemy's level", EXP can be adjusted upwards if you're below the enemy's level.

GREAT OBBIE: The worst boss I have encountered up to now. The first two thirds are trivial, then there comes a brief interesting part with Plague and lots of status effects. And then the Desaster, wiping out the whole party.

Yeah, I don't feel Grand Obbie is a particularly great optional boss. It's pretty much just a long-lasting Gobbie fight, with the catch that you need to have one character with high HP fully healed before you lay the finishing blow - which you don't know exactly when it is due to him not being scannable, although there are warning signs that you're getting close (such as him starting to use Plague).

TRANSIENT: Pretty easy this time. I always got the transient killed before it got to cast Trauma.

These Transients are a fair bit weaker than the storyline one from earlier, in addition to you now being at a higher level.

Ok, here is a HUGE difficulty spike, both with the new Phantom and the random encounters afterwards (and their instant death attacks). I tried it once, got badly mauled and then decided to do some grinding with the whole parts. I went from level 12-13 to 17-18. With these levels, I felt I was actually a bit over-leveled, because the optional boss was pretty easy, even though the random encounters were still challenging. I didn't like the invisible maze, even though its layout was good.

It sounds like you were a bit underlevelled when you got to this point. The optional boss is accessible a fair bit earlier in the game, which is why you felt overlevelled for it - you were.

Note that I wasn't yet strong enough to fight [Deadhead] head-on (pun intended), so I had to study it rather well and then be pretty sneaky: Casting only Light and healing spells on it, to avoid the draining counter-attack.

That's awesome to hear. The whole idea behind that was that a head-on assault wouldn't work too well, and you needed to pay attention to what it does.

ENCHANTER: An extremey easy boss. I targeted the man right away and was surprised when it got down and I didn't even got a chance to steal from it. I only learned about the element-changing nature from Proxima's video - it never changed any colors when I played it.

Yeah, Enchanter isn't meant to be a particularly hard fight, though probably could use a bit more difficulty.

TOROPHO: Very neat boss, even though the Torando is extremely powerful. Unfortunately I never got it down completely with Split Attacks before it casts Tornado, so I had to pool all my HP+ and DEF+ on Ivy, and revive the other party members afterwards.

...he's vunerable to Split Attack? That was not intentional, I don't think.

My favorite is the first room with the question, especially the third one. Only of the last two rooms, I am not so fond of. But I would allow doing the rooms in an arbitrary order (perhaps only forcing the bottom one to be the third one).

I like this idea.

CRAIG & BRIANNA III: Very hard, but extremely clever battle! Here comes the power of the Zombie attack on a regenerating character...

As I've mentioned, many people have stated that they feel this is the hardest battle in the game. But yes, making good use of strategic points like that is definitely the key, far more so than any grinding - they're quite capable of taking down even an overlevelled party if you just try to brute force them.

DARK RETURNER: Much harder than the first Returner, because you need to store a lot more damage to avoid the more damaging alternative spell. With level 26-27 things went very smoothly, especially as I had Haste now.

Indeed. And unlike the first one, which with a bit of luck you can get through without figuring out how he works, you really do need to figure it out for this one - unless you're so overlevelled that you can take him down before his first unleash energy.

This is the point where Proxima is up to, so I'll continue the rest in the next spoiler tag.

Beyond Proxima's current progress

DARK TRANSIENT: This requires the "Zombie counters Dark Rain" knowledge, which I didn't have and namida had to tell me. This is especially frustrating, because one would expect that the recently aquired Death Resist abilities would work at least partially here.

Hm, yeah. This fight probably wouldn't be much harder if Deathly Rain was affected by Death Resist. But to me, "zombie prevents instant death" just felt like a normal, expectable mechanic. I should probably stress this at some point, maybe put in a new earlier boss (or modify an existing one; perhaps Entity would work well for this) where this becomes apparent during an easier fight.

KNOWLEDGE TEST: I didn't like this one. I am still wondering what the "Use something that affects different enemies differently" is, because in my opinion almost all attacks work like this. That some question (even correctly answered ones) pop up multiple times is weird.

I believe the answer to that one was to use an elemental attack.

So I found out that the item Poison Dust works as well (despite the intro text), even though it gets healed (not treated via infection) and so has to be applied multiple times.

Virus only prevents HP / MP healing, not status effect healing.

The encounters at the normal time, especially the ones in the sand cave proved far too difficult for my party, so I decided to do some grinding to level 28-29 afterwards.
I went into the deep sand cave with the ability "No Encounters" put on, but got stuck there. A lot of stuff like the red crystals, the pentagon next to it or the blocking white crystal didn't do anything. And the hints Alicia translated didn't make sense, too. I will have to try this again later on.

I don't remember how to solve the cave (or even what kind of puzzles are in it), but I do remember that it's a very high-level dungeon. IIRC, the optional boss there will very easily wipe the floor with a level 30ish party. However, the ones outside the cave may need to be toned down a bit.

I did not go further to the Mayae Temple yet, because I felt I did enough of levelling up.

You wouldn't be able to anyway. It was one of those areas I never got around to making, although two of the boss battles for it - Sludgeon and Relica - exist in the source and are accessible via the debug room. Relica is a fairly interesting fight, though you need fairly high levels (it has 150k HP IIRC).

CRAIG & BRIANNA (Zombie edition): This is exceedingly difficult, even for my party of level 34. I probably made the mistake not to learn Dispel for Harley, so I have no way to remove the Haste state. While I can completely avoid Brianna's spells for three party members, a hasted Craig (even with Darkness) manages to kill them easily.

Interesting, I thought the 3rd battle was harder (though the 4th is definitely no cakewalk either).

On a side note, Nepster, I'd be very interested to see what you think about the next boss (after the one you're currently on - and just in case there's one I forgot about, the one I'm trying to refer to has the "intense" boss theme rather than the regular one). This boss in question was a lot of work to create, so if it isn't well-received I might want to consider ditching that idea for any remake.

[Nepster]

Comments on the general mechanics (very mild spoilers)

Why is it impossible to flee from boss fights, especially the ones you can see coming?

More generally I've expected that most bosses are immune (or at least highly resistant) to certain "cheap-ish" maneuvers that would otherwise work on most random-encounter enemies, for example percent-based damage that eg. takes out half of target's remaining HP, and escape would certainly be something I expect to fall under "haha, nice try but it's a boss".

Sorry, but I didn't want to suggest fleeing as a method to bypass a boss. Even after fleeing the boss, it should still be there and requireing actual defeat. But sometimes you run into a boss that turns out to be much too difficult for the currently (unprepared or under-levelled) party. In such situations I would like to be able to flee, in oder to avoid the "Game Over" screen and having to restart from the last save point. Sometimes it only needs healing the party again and redistributing some abilities to defeat the boss.

I don't remember the specifics of item costs, but if an item is not generally available for sale (ie. your characters can buy them) in a shop, I do expect that many would not be valuable to sell back for GP either.  Items that are available for sale in a shop I usually expect maybe sold back at 1/3 to 1/2 of bought price [...]

The problem here is, that e.g. a tool shop buys abilities or potions at the normal rate, but not stuf like "Vampire Fangs" (which is a flowery name of a bomb-type item).

This is a fairly standard RPG mechanic. The idea is basically "you can get rid of them if you want to, but you won't make money off them". Perhaps this could be removed (and the items just made unsellable) with the addition of a way to simply discard unwanted items.

What is the point of disappointing the player that seemingly semi-useful items are worth nothing? Grinding for money can still be done, because some monsters have Ice/Water Touch as steals, which sell for 800. So apart from "standard RPG mechanics", I still don't know any actual reason why this should be done like this?
With the blue magic items, I agree. They should simply not appear when your Blue Mage has learned the spell.

I think for the most part, it makes sense that you can't stack abilities. The +??%s are a special case where maybe it doesn't make sense, but imagine being able to stack four HP+100%s... (yes, those exist, at least in the code; not sure if any are accessible in-game). It would be a total gamebreaker if the enemies weren't adjusted for the possibility, and basically just reduce it to "grind until you can afford four of them for every character" if the enemies were adjusted for it - unless they just became extremely reliant on proportional damage attacks, which isn't ideal either.

I think stacking abilities is not really a problem, as long as stacking four HP+100%s only yields five times as much HP, not 16 times as much (i.e. the percentage always refers to the base value). At the point where the player has multiple HP+100%s, the party members will fare much better with Omniproofs or Multi Resists or similar, instead of just some more HP.

Osmosis isn't completely useless though - it can be very useful if you need to top up some MP. This is somewhat negated by the frequency of save crystals, which also recover your party.

I almost never need more than half of my MP points and only ever used Liquer once at all - at the very first dungeon . So Osmosis would very likely still be totally useless (especially once Vince can recharge MP).

My thoughts on how to deal with this: Allow saving everywhere [...]

This would change the game-style quite a bit, so think long and hard whether you really want this. Allowing saving everywhere will likely result in players saving after every battle or treasure. So there would never be any reason to continue playing if a random encounter didn't go very well.

[...] make the crystals rarer and solely for recovery - and perhaps either a limited number of uses, or have a "recharge" period between uses. (I did also consider the idea of removing them altogether in favor of just making Tomes a bit more common, but the difference is that Tomes can be used anywhere (as long as it's outside battle), whereas a healing crystal would only be in one specific place.)

I like to have some way to get unlimited recharges. Limiting the crystals and making them rarer is probably still a good idea, but perhaps turn staying overnight in an inn into a full recharge?
With all items or stuff that have only a limited amount of uses and no way to get more, I am incredibly hesistant to use them. So making the crystals having only a few charges, will likely result in me being a lot more hesitant about using MPs, even though I probably wouldn't have to worry about that.

Comments on comments regarding specific segments (big spoilers)

I see where you're coming from that Trauma looks like a magical attack, though it is explicitly pointed out by one of the party members that it's physical and that Defend can reduce it (and that Pulse is magical and Defend will not work, for that matter).

Yeah, I remember. But the Pulse looks so much like a physical attack and the Trauma so much like a magical one, that I automatically assumed to have misremembered that part and swapped the two names.

Just out of curiosity: What does the shady character sell here?

I don't remember exactly what it is, but in general, they sell very good abilities; I recall one of the very early ones selling Auto-Haste but I don't remember which one it was.

That would be surprisingly cheap for 17,000 gold. I got Alchemy for 6,000, Auto-Reflect for 60,000 and Multiproof for 100,000.

Did you pick up on his pattern [of Flunky]?

I noticed that Radar is cast on every second turn, but not the other part.

Regarding the [redacted] though, do keep in mind that it's not intended that every random encounter is reasonable to take on the first time you get somewhere - this is why the Escape option is pointed out at the start of the game, and again when Vince joins.

Yes, but if a moster is beatable I want to beat it, in order to see whether it has any interesting spoils. And almost all random monsters can be beaten the first try. The only cases I actually fled have been some specifically nasty flower combination on the Yuvia road (not including the one mentioned above), and the Deadhead.
So if you want me to flee from random encounters, then you have to add some clearly too-difficult random enemies.

But to me, "zombie prevents instant death" just felt like a normal, expectable mechanic.

As I already mentioned in chat, this might be true for someone familiar with FF. But I was familiar with Zombie meaning a "zombie state of mind", i.e. some kind of sleep without wearing out on being attacked. Obviously here it's something different, so I don't have any assumptions at all, what it does and what it doesn't do.
And keep in mind that the game has the monster state "Undead" and "Zombie - Auto". And while I intuitively assume that Death attacks won't work on undeads, this distinction muddies the waters quite a bit.

Virus only prevents HP / MP healing, not status effect healing.

And here I thought Regen was a status effect healing...

[namida]

Spoiler

And here I thought Regen was a status effect healing...

Maybe we're on two different pages here. The healing from Regen is HP healing, so it should prevent that. What I meant to say was that, for example, being under Virus won't prevent you from healing status effects on that character; you just can't heal their HP or MP. (And I might even be wrong about MP.)

I don't remember the exact details of the fight this is concerning, just that in general those four bosses have some very unusual rules, so maybe there's something I'm overlooking, too.

[ccexplore]

More Comments on the general mechanics (very mild spoilers)

Why is it impossible to flee from boss fights, especially the ones you can see coming?<snip>

Sorry, but I didn't want to suggest fleeing as a method to bypass a boss.<snip>

Now that I think about it, you may have a good point.   At first I somehow thought even when the boss isn't bypassed by escaping, the player still gets some advantage.  But on further thought, the advantage is usually pretty minimal if not none, and for the most part, it really wouldn't be all that different from restarting at a savepoint with full HP/MP/status heal right before the battle.

I do want to point out that in most RPGs, there is usually a savepoint right before a boss battle, to the effect that you can often tell you're about to have a boss encounter just by presence of the savepoint.  I don't remember if namida's game is like that or not.  I can also imagine some (admittedly rare) setups where escaping can create some unwanted side effects:  1) sequences of bosses where the game intentionally do not want to allow you to heal between one boss and the next; 2) bosses which you are expected to use certain rare items as part of the intended strategy, so fleeing then restarting becomes a problem since you no longer have the items.

Perhaps an alternative is to have something like Lemming's nuke, where the player can immediately trigger a give-up of a boss battle and go right back to the last savepoint (then again, I believe this is no different than simply allowing you to reload from a savepoint anywhere, anytime in the game [edit: to clarify, I'm talking strictly about reloading; saving can still be confined to specific savepoint locations]).  Together with being consistent with providing savepoints right before boss battles, it should mostly cover what you'd want out of the ability to flee boss battles.  (Oh, and yes, ability to skip certain types of dialogs, which frankly is pretty standard nowadays, not just in RPGs but more generally in games, to the point that sometimes I inadvertently skip dialog by accident and is sad that there is often no way to revisit dialogs I've skipped.)

What is the point of disappointing the player that seemingly semi-useful items are worth nothing?<snip>

[edit: perhaps I should lead with this instead:  will it make any difference for you had the game stick consistently to a system where:
  - items that are never sold in shops (for you to buy), you cannot sell back either (the shop simply won't give you the option to sell back those kinds of items).  There's a way to discard items to declutter the inventory
  - items that are sold in shops, you can always sell back at a fix % of the bought price.]

Short answer: Isn't it enough that the items are useful?  I'm not opposed to having a stronger convention where monetary values are always proportional to the item's usefulness to the player, but at the same time, I'm generally fine with items being primarily only beneficial in either ability or monetary but not both, especially items that are only obtained through steals and drops from random encounters.  I will concede that items that can be bought in a shop should probably stick consistently to a formula (based on the bought price) when it comes to resale value.  For other items, one can argue that you have no expectations of resale monetary value since for whatever reasons, it's not generally being sold in the world to begin with.  Maybe it's bad luck in your game's universe to try to sell certain types of items.

[Nepster]

Comments to ccexplore - Heavy spoilers - Do not read until you saw a Spellbinder

I do want to point out that in most RPGs, there is usually a savepoint right before a boss battle, to the effect that you can often tell you're about to have a boss encounter just by presence of the savepoint.  I don't remember if namida's game is like that or not.  I can also imagine some (admittedly rare) setups where escaping can create some unwanted side effects:  1) sequences of bosses where the game intentionally do not want to allow you to heal between one boss and the next; 2) bosses which you are expected to use certain rare items as part of the intended strategy, so fleeing then restarting becomes a problem since you no longer have the items.

namida has placed save points regularly, but not before every boss fight.
Good points regarding the unwanted side effects. Fortunately they are (up to the point where I am now) not really relevant for namida's RPG: There is always time to heal between boss battles. And up to now I have only found two bosses where usage of rare items is expected:
a) Transient: Here you should have 5 Softening Sands, given to you by the front door guardsman. This would have to change into being able to restock on Softening Sands (up to a maximum of 5) by talking to the guardsman (or something similar).
b) Undead boss during flashback scene: Here you have one Regen item and are expected to use it in this battle. This is quite a bit harder to fix, but then you get the Regen item quite a bit earlier, so there is a (low) chance that one used it already.
And maybe there is a third such battle:
c) Strategy test before becoming Guardians: I suspect that one should use the Sneaky Powder in this battle, but I tried that and always failed. Then I used some completely different strategy. So I have actually no clue what the intended strategy here would be.

Short answer: Isn't it enough that the items are useful?  I'm not opposed to having a stronger convention where monetary values are always proportional to the item's usefulness to the player, but at the same time, I'm generally fine with items being primarily only beneficial in either ability or monetary but not both, especially items that are only obtained through steals and drops from random encounters.  I will concede that items that can be bought in a shop should probably stick consistently to a formula (based on the bought price) when it comes to resale value.  For other items, one can argue that you have no expectations of resale monetary value since for whatever reasons, it's not generally being sold in the world to begin with.  Maybe it's bad luck in your game's universe to try to sell certain types of items.

I would just like some more consistency. For example being not able to sell any of the Blue Magic learning items is fine (but they shouldn't clutter the inventory menu). What I don't like are cases where one expects to be able to sell something, because one already has sold some similar (possibly weaker) items, but then discovers that one doesn't get even that much money:
- Hand Granade (damages one monster) sells for around 150 gold (I don't remember exactly), but Vampire Fang (which simply adds the draining ability to it) sells for 1 gold.
- Phoenix Dust (revive party at 1 HP) sells for 500 gold, but Phoenix Wing (revive party at full HP) sells for 1 gold.
- Hyper Potion (restores HP) sells for 1250 gold, but Elixir (restore both HP and MP) sells for 1 gold.
- Reduce Enounters (halves amount of random fights) sells for something around 3000 gold (if I remember correctly), but No Encounters (completely eliminates random encounters) is worth only 1 gold.
(Sorry that my first examples a few posts above were chosen badly.)

And regarding whether it isn't enough that some items are useful: What items exactly are useful depends to some degree on the general playing style. Proxima is constantly buying Liquer (Plus), which I am selling. On the other hand I am buying status inflicting items, which Proxima seems to ignore completely.

[ccexplore]

Spoiler tag not really needed:  would it be enough if the sellback price is the same as for the "regular" item you are comparing with in your list?  Or do you still prefer a higher sellback price?

This is assuming that the "regular" item is also readily available (perhaps more so) from steals/drops as well, so that there is no particular advantage for the "nonregular" item to have same sellback price as the regular one, since you could always grind for the regular item instead for same amount of money.

I should also confess that it doesn't seem to be my playing style in general to grind for money, except for special cases like playing a low-level game.  That could well explain why I seem generally less bothered by item resale values.  But I guess it depends on the game as well, I could easily see a game where money is harder to come by or items tend to be more expensive than the player can afford without extra grinding.

[Nepster]

Would it be enough if the sellback price is the same as for the "regular" item you are comparing with in your list?  Or do you still prefer a higher sellback price?

Yes, already geting the same amount as for the "regular" item would be nice.

I should also confess that it doesn't seem to be my playing style in general to grind for money, except for special cases like playing a low-level game.  That could well explain why I seem generally less bothered by item resale values.

I am not grinding for money either, especially as I am usually pretty rich already and don't need the additional money. Still it somhow rubs my sense of fairness...

[namida]

Money is not the easiest to come by in the early parts of this game.

Mechanics spoilers - Different people may have different judgements about how serious this one is; it would be very minor to anyone who's far enough in the game to encounter Cave Obbie and /or Spellbinder, but could still be slightly spoilery until the end of the game

When you get to around Corgent, money becomes much easier to get thanks to steal abuse. Also, not many new items with higher costs tend to appear beyond this point, so money also becomes less nessecary.

[namida]

As I've mentioned in chat, I'm going to release an update that rebalances the difficulty in a few parts (such as the road to Trivia). This will also include a few bugfixes - in particular the reorder-on-escape bug, the glitchiness of Blessing, and a crash during one of the storyline bosses under certian conditions.

This update won't deliberately include new content, but it is possible that newer content exists in the source code than is in the latest release. If this is the case, that content will be included in the update.

I'm hoping to get this update done by Friday at the absolute latest (preferably sooner).

[Proxima]

If you're going to be doing an update... in my latest video, I give a few suggestions for improving one of the battles I found extremely annoying:

Spoiler

Yuki + Sasha

Also, as I've mentioned in chat, I hope you will reconsider your idea of having the Sensor ability automatically on. Yes, it's extremely helpful for a few bosses (like DT) that heavily depend on anticipating the boss's next move; but most of the time it's ugly screen clutter. At the very least, maybe instead of an ability it could be a setting that the player could turn on or off at any time?

[namida]

At the very least, maybe instead of an ability it could be a setting that the player could turn on or off at any time?

I could look into this. However, don't you think that, especially in a turn-based game where many factors can influence turn timing (Agility stat, buffs / debuffs, Haste / Slow, and even which attack you use can affect how quickly your next turn comes - the turn order gauge adjusts for this when you hover over any attack, too), it's quite important to have turn order visible?

[Nepster]

This will also include a few bugfixes - in particular the reorder-on-escape bug, [...]

I don't know what others prefer, but I would like to return to the order at the beginning of the battle in any case, even without fleeing the battle. In other words: Any switching done during the battle should not have an impact on the order after the battle. Only explicit formation changes in the character menu should have an impact.
I am aware that my suggestion is probably another piece on non-standard RPG-mechanics, so don't hesitate to tell me why this is suggestion is idiotic.

[Proxima]

I could look into this. However, don't you think that, especially in a turn-based game where many factors can influence turn timing (Agility stat, buffs / debuffs, Haste / Slow, and even which attack you use can affect how quickly your next turn comes - the turn order gauge adjusts for this when you hover over any attack, too), it's quite important to have turn order visible?

Strange question -- you can see from my video series that I don't consider it important. I put Sensor on for two battles (Returner and DT) and never used it apart from that. (And I wouldn't have needed it for Returner if I'd understood how the fight works; I didn't bother with it for DR.) Sensor is absolutely essential for DT, in which the boss's move sequence is entirely fixed, and the battle hinges on knowing what's coming next and fully preparing for it -- which requires actions from all party members and knowing when to switch them. In most fights, though, knowing when the boss will act doesn't tell you what it will do; so most gameplay consists of either reacting to the boss's last move, or deciding that your current strength is sufficient and you can afford to get in some attacks.

It could just be a matter of different players having different styles of gameplay, which goes back to my suggestion of making it an option so that we're both happy.

I don't know what others prefer, but I would like to return to the order at the beginning of the battle in any case, even without fleeing the battle. In other words: Any switching done during the battle should not have an impact on the order after the battle. Only explicit formation changes in the character menu should have an impact.
I am aware that my suggestion is probably another piece on non-standard RPG-mechanics, so don't hesitate to tell me why this is suggestion is idiotic.

That's an interesting point. Because of how the EXP/AP system works, I constantly need to switch in battle, and then revert to my usual front four. For random encounters, I just leave the party as-is and switch in battle to save time, but for bosses I need to switch before the battle starts. Either way, it would be a convenience to keep the front four fixed as you suggest. But other players might prefer it not to work this way and might get confused if they switch during battle and expect the switched actor to remain active.

Alternatively, consider changing the EXP/AP mechanics. Constantly switching the party members gets rather tiresome. (Though I admit, the fact that you have to choose only four to receive AP does make for some interesting choices.) Another refinement would be to allow knocked-out members to receive EXP. I know this is a traditional FF mechanic, but, as Simon would say, just because it's traditional doesn't necessarily mean it's good.

[namida]

Switching characters in-battle is a mechanic I haven't seen in many games. I can maybe think of three - Final Fantasy X, Pokemon and Jade Cocoon. How it affects levelling is different between all three, so I'm not sure if any standard rule really exists. Instead, I should make sure this game's mechanic is clearly explained - and definitely that there isn't an NPC who outright lies about it*.

* Technically, what the NPC in question says WAS true in early builds

[namida]

Regarding returning to original order after any battle - this should be doable. I will have to check whether it causes issues with one specific boss battle though (if you've fought the one I'm thinking of, you can probably guess that it's the one).

EDIT: It appears that "return to original order after battle no matter what" is already in the source code.

[namida]

Rebalance update is ready.

First, I dropped the "Curse of Saria" subtitle from the game's name. It doesn't fit that well with how the storyline evolved as I was making it.

I don't think any new content is available compared to the current build - although a bit exists in the code, it's quite buggy and only partly complete so I decided to block access to it for now.

Most strongly affected areas are the path to Yuvia, and the Eastern Ranges. There's a few small tweaks elsewhere. Notably, also, the Sensor ability has been removed; turn order is now always visible. AP costs have also been altered, most of the changes being reductions (you'll get an AP boost when you load an old save to compensate for that you may have already learnt skills at a higher price). Some MP / BP costs have been tweaked too. Three moves have had significant alterations: Use no longer has any MP cost; Stand Ground now only lasts until the character's next turn but also counters magical attacks (the first half of this is actually what it was intended to do; it lasting indefinitely was a glitch); and Outrage has been removed altogether and replaced with a new skill, "Gamble".

Also, Blessing should no longer be glitchy.

Fresh download: Download via DropBox
Upgrade: Download via DropBox

[Nepster]

Here is some more feedback and bug reports. Note that I was still using the old version to play these parts.

Until the underground city

The First Weapon:
Very nice dungeon layout. My main problem was that I had sound (and music) disabled, so I didn't hear the different sounds on the red crystals. Luckily there is a plaque mentioning the importance of sound, which finally made me turning the sound on. The random encounters were managable with level 35. Only the Sand Mantis still proved to be difficult.
FIRST WEAPON: At the end of this dungeon I was level 37. Fortunately the boss uses lots of Thrash attacks, which inflict Zombie and reduce the HP to 1. But that was fine, because I concentrated on reviving my fallen party members, so the boss would have fared better if it would have defended instead. Still it wasn't an easy fight, especially given the impressive 200,000HP.

Ice Caves Revisited:
CRAIG & BRIANNA (Zombie edition): This even with level 38 this is still a HUGE roadblock. First of all I stocked up on Phoenix Dusts, because there seems to be no other way to survive Craig's attackes. Then Amanda got Omniproof and magic boosts to continuously cast the group Light spell. Alicia got the Auto-Reflect, Light Touch and HP+100% to attack by hand, whenever not using Breaker Bombs. That's because Harley's Dispel proved too slow for all the Haste casts. Lenna got drain abilities for all four basic elements, to stay alive and use Phoenix Dust and finally there was Ivy who basically got the function to divert some of Craig's attacks.
This setup worked relatively well, until Craig got down and Brianna started to cast Flare and Desaster. Even with Aura, this killed my party members instantly almost every time. Only the Auto-Reflect proved to be a relatively good shield against them. So I stopped reviving my dead party members and just hoped that all this nasty stuff got reflected to Brianna until she went down, too.
WRIATH: Relatively easy boss once you cast Regen on it and/or slow it. Nice posession mechanics. At first I tried to induce Sleep on the posessed character, then tried to take of the Zombie status. Neither worked...

Hunting Ground Revisited:
I came here just to check whether a new optional boss is available, and it was:
ELECTRO GUY: From the description in the hunting club, I expected a fire elemental and equippen accordingly. So I lost a few turns changing equipment. Fortunately the boss wasn't really that strong and could easily be handled by my 40-level party.

Water Cave:
Excellent dungeon layout - very confusing! The random enemies are very nice. The most annoying is the Karmeleon with it's hiding ability. Aquarion and the Qrab are fortunately vulnerable to sleep, so one can pick them on one-by-one and with Amanda's Thunderia and Osmosis, one doesn't even have to waken them. I love the Aquarats as encounters, because they are vulnerable to sleep, too. So they are easy food and have the Potion-Jug as a steal.
If you made these random monsters easiers, then perhaps add some low resistance to sleep and slow to them?
WATER ELEMENTAL: I had enough protection against water damage, that this boss did no damage at all during the whole fight. So this was a bit boring...
METALITHE: The first part with two pods was rather nasty and the Trauma attack (on group 2) took my by surprise. But after I equipped a HP+100% to Ivy, who then survived Trauma and could easily heal the party with blessing, the rest was rather easy. After all pods were down, I expected some nastier water spells, but with all my water resistance items still on, this last part was almost trivial. By that time, I was around level 41, btw.

Hunting Ground Revisited:
FIELD TRANSIENT: I still hate these Trauma attacks. Three of my party members were constantly trying to keep everyone alive and reasonable healthy, while only Amanda did damage. Nice challenge.
OCTOPWN: Far too easy! With eight arms I expected it to be a lot faster or have more hits.

Sysona:
Very interesting town layout I would prefer several big areas instead of tons of small parts, though. There are some very interesting should there. And a dark dealer, but I wonder how on earth you expect someone to get 3,000,000 gold? Unfortunately a bug prevented me to progress.

Worldmap:
Given the bug with Mia (see below), I tried to find and tackle the worldmap monsters, mentioned when we got the boat.
SUZUKA: Very interesting steal, but far too difficult for my current party. I survive only about 4 rounds at the moment. Will come back to it at some later point.
LEVIATHAN: Interesting encounter, but not really that difficult for my level 40 party: The rather weak water attacks and only physical attacks that target one member for less than half their HP can be withstood quite easily. I should note that I already tried it with a level 35 party (before the First Waepon), but got beaten then.

Bug reports - Spoilers

• Ivy's BP getting reset on switching to another party in the Metalithe boss fight.
• After the Metalithe battle, the command "COMMAND" to swich parties is still present for some party members (but not for all!).
• Lena leaves the party with any comment - every time you board the ship at the water cave, even when she did so already once and there was no mention of her joining again. In fact she is still in the party, despite the animation!
• When battling Sand Mantis, Alicia gets a Ghost status. At first I thought this was due to her Auto-Shield, but then it appeared in Proxima's video, too.
• When you talk to Mia in her private rooms, she repeats "I'm sorry." endlessly. And you cannot excape her...
• After defeating Leviathan, the party icon displays Tara, not the boat.

[namida]

Bug report feedback; same spoilers as above

Ivy's BP getting reset on switching to another party in the Metalithe boss fight.

I noticed this recently. Will fix.

After the Metalithe battle, the command "COMMAND" to swich parties is still present for some party members (but not for all!).

I'm guessing this relates to the party switching - I'm guessing (without looking at the code) it happens for either (a) everyone who wasn't in the party that ended the battle; (b) everyone who meets condition A *and* participated in the battle at some point; or (c) everyone who never entered the battle. Will investigate.

Lena leaves the party with any comment - every time you board the ship at the water cave, even when she did so already once and there was no mention of her joining again. In fact she is still in the party, despite the animation!

Not quite sure what you mean there. From a quick look at the code, I don't see any reason why a bug could occur - maybe it was fixed in the rebalance (via being fixed in the source code ages ago but never released). Nonetheless, I'll take a closer look.

When battling Sand Mantis, Alicia gets a Ghost status. At first I thought this was due to her Auto-Shield, but then it appeared in Proxima's video, too.

I saw that in Proxima's video too. Ghost is a very obscure status effect so I had to actually look through them to find which one had that icon. I did notice some useless code in the Sand Mantis's AI, but it shouldn't have had this effect; with that being said, I did notice a similar oddity in another battle* that had some slightly incorrectly-written code, so I've removed that useless code. I'll have to take a closer look at that battle sometime, though.

* Spoilers for which battle - this is an optional battle that neither you nor Proxima have found

Second, optional, battle against Aisha. In existing versions (including V018), you can fight a rematch against her at any time after finishing the Eastern Ranges, up until the end of the currently released content. There is a bug in this battle where characters stats may randomly become permanently maxed.

When you talk to Mia in her private rooms, she repeats "I'm sorry." endlessly. And you cannot excape her...

Yep, this bug is why Sysona is blocked off in V018. I've got all remaining made-but-not-released content in a releasable state now, but I'm going to add one more dungeon before releasing because it's so close to the previous update otherwise.

After defeating Leviathan, the party icon displays Tara, not the boat.

Will look into this.


By the way, saves made in Sysona will not load correctly on V018. But if you keep them around, they'll load fine on the next update.

[namida]

As per Proxima's request, I added an option to show or hide the turn order meter. It's even (or rather, only) possible to change the setting in-battle.

[namida]

Okay, I was hoping to have the next dungeon (in terms of what's completed, not what's released) ready before another update, but with Crash Bandicoot: N Sane Trilogy coming out tomorrow, I don't see much work happening for a while, and at the moment I've only got the dungeon maybe 40% complete.

So, here's the V019 update, without that dungeon, but still wtih a couple of new ones that weren't in the previous releases (and the stuff that was accessible but crashed in V017x now works fine!).

Aside from this extra content, there have been a couple more very minor rebalancing touches, a few bugfixes, and two major changes to game mechanics:
- You can now save anywhere (from the menu). This does not recover your HP. Save crystals still exist, and do recover your HP, but they are now much rarer.
- An option has been added (in the battle commands menu) to turn the turn order display on or off. This does not take up the character's turn, just in case anyone was worried about that. It should default to on, but it's easy to change if it doesn't.

Fresh install: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dpivtcoawqo7sy3/LoaO_V019_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnn8l8xod0b26q0/LoaO_V019_Upgrade.zip?dl=1

[Proxima]

So I feel this is a good point for me to pause and give my own feedback on the game so far

First and most importantly, I really love this game. I don't have much experience of RPGs -- the only ones I've played to completion are FF9 and Chrono Trigger, both a long time ago. This has the same elements of fun -- exploring dungeons, mazes and puzzles; beating up monsters in a simple turn-based combat system; developing your characters through level progression, equipment and new abilities; making choices for how to develop, with both immediate and long-term strategic implications; easily defeating monsters that had been a huge threat earlier in the game But this game adds an extra dimension, in that most of the bosses are really challenging and force the player to observe the boss's mechanics and weak points, and come up with a strategy to take them out. Sometimes this takes the form of single "aha" insights that are really satisfying when they click (as with that one boss in Taspia...); other times it's a gradual process of improving one's strategy and making further observations and tweaks, as with DT. It's been a huge amount of fun so far, and I really hope that's come out in my video series.

It's also a pleasure to be working with a developer who takes feedback seriously and improves those parts of the game that are less fun, like a change namida made just now to the second-last boss I've reached, which will make that fight much more fun and less frustrating.

Now I'm going to go into detail about parts of the game, and mechanics you might not learn for a while, so everything from now on may contain spoilers up to the part I've reached, namely the "W" (1 word, 6 letters) boss. Also, there may be some duplication with what I've already said in my videos; but it's more convenient for namida to have everything in a post like this than to have to rewatch 25 hours of video footage if he wants to look over my feedback again.

General comments

Title: Honestly, I prefer Curse of Saria over Legends of an Otherworld. The latter is very generic and doesn't give any clue as to the game's content; it could apply to virtually any RPG. I get the impression, from what you've said, that you dropped Curse of Saria because it was meant to refer to an aspect of the plot that you've dropped; but it's always seemed clear enough to me. In the early part of the game, we learn that several people from Saria have gone through the same experience as our heroines, disappearing and losing their memories; and there are unanswered questions surrounding this that I assumed would be resolved later in the plot. (Why does the Metaspe connect with Saria? Why does everyone attach so much importance to Cameron?)

Character names: Aisha and Alicia are definitely too similar, as are Lena and Leanna. (A pity, because other than the similarity, those are all names I like.) While less of a problem, I would also avoid Alicia/Amanda and Leanna/Brianna.

Boss names: I'm disappointed by how many bosses have a generic name that is just the type of monster they are, like "Golem" and "Ice elemental". Not that bosses necessarily have to have proper names; an abstract noun can be good if it's unusual and evocative. "Transient" is an excellent name.

Story and characterisation: There have been a few points where I've been disappointed at how the playable characters react to events.
-- Ben. There was no reaction at all to the fact that, for the first time in the game, a party member just killed a human opponent. Indeed, I was sure he'd just run off and would reappear, until Alicia referred to his death later on. I'd expect Tara and Leanna to be horrified and get nervous around Alicia; then she refuses to explain and walks off; and Harley calms them down.
-- Craig and Brianna. Similarly, Tara and Leanna should be more upset that they had to kill a girl around their own age. You could even have different dialogue depending on whether the player uses the Zombie/Regen trick; if they do, one of the characters could say "Well, it was really her own magic that killed her...."
-- Cult attack on Saria. This is Tara and Leanna's hometown, and they must have had friends and family; yet they only seem to care about Cameron. Sure, Tara has amnesia at this point, but on meeting Lena, she could ask about whether there are any other family members.
-- Yuki and Sasha. Sasha decides to fight Alicia to the death because "there's no choice", but the pier is right behind them. This dialogue and fight would pack much more of an emotional punch if it went something like this:
-- -- Sasha tells Alicia to stand aside, they have to fight the cult to get the Red Shard or the whole world could be in danger.
-- -- Alicia, still furious at her town being destroyed over a fairy tale, doesn't even tell Sasha she has the shard.
-- -- Sasha gets impatient and says "Stand aside, or we'll have to kill you."
-- -- Alicia shouts something like "Go on then, kill me like you killed Mitana and the others!"
-- -- The realisation dawns that Alicia isn't going to stand aside and they do actually have to fight her. One of them (maybe Yuki) says "Looks like we really have to do this. I'm sorry."
-- -- When Alicia meets their ghosts (earlier in the game) she could tell them she had the shard all along, and that would convince them of her sincerity. The player then wonders what the shard is and why it's important, and this gets answered in the flashback later.
(Also, I really don't think Alicia should swear as much as she does, considering her age.)

Dungeon layouts and mapping

Maps tend to be rather plain, with only one type of floor and walls, and few distinguishing features.

Maze dungeons, like the forest, the cave under Sturges, and the ice forest, were fun for me because I played them "normally". But having only random encounters means the player could trivialise the dungeons by escaping from every encounter (or equipping No Encounters once it's available), allowing them to get a lot of loot for free (or almost free, considering First Weapon, but he's not that hard). It's even possible to clear out the underwater temple and get a lot of good loot before completing the mountain.

I wouldn't recommend dealing with this by removing No Encounters, since that makes it much more comfortable to revisit old areas (and the ability appears at just the right time for that). Also, escaping from everything is still possible. Instead, I'd suggest having more touch encounters, as you did in the Nom Plant swamp and the Transient Lite dungeon, and never again after that.

Some maps had too little variety of random encounters, particularly the Nom Plant swamp and the mountain. (The mountain has about as much variety as most maps, but it's also much larger, and it repeats some monsters from the Sturges caves.)

Game mechanics

Save-everywhere: I've been on the RPG Maker forums for a while, and general consensus is that save-everywhere is good because some people only have time to play the game in short bursts, or could be interrupted at any time.

For myself, being in the lucky position of having large chunks of uninterrupted time, I enjoyed the challenge of restricted saving, particularly for the forest gravestone optional dungeon, where the monsters were much tougher and I knew there was always a risk I wouldn't make it out. Still, the player always has the option of challenging themselves to only save at crystals if they like, so save-everywhere is a good way of having it both ways. You could give the player an option to explicitly turn save-everywhere off, but I'm not sure it would be worth it.

Abilities and AP: Early on I was a bit frustrated about how far off some of the AP goals seemed, but later it became apparent that the system is well-balanced. For instance, at the point (around Corgent) that I had the choice between learning Haste or Regen with Harley, it would have made the game a lot easier if AP costs were lowered enough that I could already afford both. I haven't looked through the changes in the new version, but it looks like you've only made small tweaks rather than drastically lowering costs, so I'm happy with that.

Alicia should have more learnable abilities, and Mix should cost less.

Maybe consider more abilities for other party members? It's a bit weird that Harley still has a lot of good stuff to learn when everyone else has pretty much run out. And depending on how long the game goes on, more abilities at Level 45 might not be such a bad idea.

I like the fact that I have to choose which four members to receive AP, as this is an interesting strategical decision. But it means Ivy and Lena don't get much of a show in random encounters Also, I would like knocked-out members to receive AP, particularly for the Bolder crapshoot. (If you don't like the idea of doing this for all encounters, maybe just do it for bosses?)

Items selling for 1 Kx: I agree with Nepster, it's weird that upgraded versions of items sell for less than the originals. Also, it means there's no incentive to try for steals, except from a few types of monster. (It's true that post-Corgent, the player has the option of grinding for money; but since I avoid grinding, I've found myself being tight for money most of the time.)

But my biggest gripe with the 1 Kx pricetag is that it gives away whether or not an item will ever be sold in shops.

Also, "Kx" doesn't work for me as a currency name, unless you tell the player (as early as Caralint) what it stands for.

Osmosis: I would definitely prefer draining enemies' MP to prevent them casting. I don't think this would spoil any encounters; random encounters don't last long enough for it to be viable, and bosses could have enough MP that this strategy doesn't trivialise them; late-game bosses could even replenish their MP with Faith. If you made it a viable strategy, it could be a fun way to tackle certain fights, and an alternative strategy that would let the player get around certain roadblock bosses.

Escaping: I agree with Nepster, it's weird that Escape and Flee have dedicated tutorial battles (when several other game mechanics don't), yet there are almost no random encounters that are actually dangerous enough to warrant them. Stealth Snake (the tutorial battle for Escape) reappears as the first boss, and is easy to defeat even if you haven't levelled up. Zantetsuken (the tutorial battle for Flee) is laughable. The only random encounter to which my response was "Escape immediately!" was Blade x 2 in the invisible maze. Their physical attack one-shotted any party member at that point, and, there being two of them, they could typically kill all my party members before I could take them down. (Thus, Vince's comment on the Zantetsuken would make much more sense if it was a party of two.) Stealth Snake doesn't necessarily need changing; the player will almost certainly level before reaching the boss, and it's satisfying to take down a monster that was highlighted earlier as being particularly dangerous.

I don't know whether you've changed this in the rebalancing update, but I agree that Bloob is not a battle you'd want to Escape, as it's completely non-threatening, it just takes for ever to take it down.

Boss-by-boss breakdown

I don't have feedback on every boss; most of them are fun and about the right level of challenge.

Stealth Snake: Appropriately easy for the first boss, and a good test of what you've learned. The first dungeon is all about knowing which enemies to use Dark Attack on, and which to use Silence Attack on; for the boss, you just need to use both.

Phantom 1: This felt like a rehash of Stealth Snake, with no new features.

Craig and Brianna 1: Great boss, a nice step up in difficulty but not too much of one.

Meganom: Unlike Nepster, I took out the Nom Plants first. This was also a good boss fight.

Spirit: Mostly fine, but "Drain"-spamming got really annoying.

Transient: I like the puzzle of analysing the attack pattern, and defending before Trauma. However, even having solved this, the boss is likely to be too difficult for the levels you have when you reach it, forcing the player to grind. I'm not sure the best way to deal with this (and I'm going to have a go at starting a new game and attempting it at low levels, to get more of a feel for it), but even having five Softening Sand instead of four would make a difference.

Craig and Brianna 2: Awesome fight, one of my favourites in the game.

Grand Obbie: Seems impossible to survive Disaster at the levels you're likely to have before re-entering the Metaspe, when this fight becomes unavailable for a long time. When it's next available (after Dark Transient) you're about the right level for Disaster, but the entire rest of the fight (and the dungeon) is extremely easy. So, Disaster seems to be the part that needs changing. I rather like Nepster's suggestion of replacing it with Deathly Rain.

Microsient dungeon: This is where I gave up the first time I played the game. This time, I had enough AP to give Leanna Breaker Attack. Split Attack is also excellent for this dungeon. But it seems likely to be a huge roadblock if the player has made bad choices for which abilities to get. Again, giving more Softening Sand would be a lifesaver.

Craig and Brianna 3: Very hard until I got the idea to use Zombie, which was a lovely "aha" moment. But the fight was disappointingly easy after that. As I said above, I'd prefer it if draining Brianna's MP was a viable strategy, both so there's another way around the roadblock if the player doesn't click onto the intended solution, and because the fight would still be difficult.

Dark Returner: A very nice challenge. This boss really depended on understanding the mechanics and working out a strategy.

Dark Transient: Awesome. Probably my favourite boss of the game so far. This one really tested your understanding and strategy, and since every action counted, it was nail-biting all the way to the end.

Test of Knowledge: Okay idea, but the repeated questions were annoying. "Use something helpful" should totally have accepted Regen. I'm sure you could think up some harder questions for this.

Bolder: Pretty hilarious, since buying Omni Resist for everyone completely neutralised it. The finale, where Explode takes out a random party member and deprives them of AP, was really annoying.

Aisha: Long and tedious, and then she makes it worse near the end by casting Wall.

Yuki and Sasha: You've already addressed my complaint here, which was that it should be easier to get Sensor Spheres. With that out of the way, it's a pretty good puzzle boss.

First Weapon: Awesome! In spite of the very high HP, this was a really tense and enjoyable fight -- partly because so much was riding on it, whether I'd be able to get out of the cave and enjoy my loot, or have to go back to an earlier save.

Warrior Fish / Golem: Simple. Both can only single-target, so they can be taken out with physical attacks and reviving any knocked-out party members. Golem's very high defence makes this laborious, so I looked around and spotted the Zombie+Regen weakness.

Phantom 4: Excellent boss. But much harder than Warrior Fish and Golem, so why does it give less AP?

Craig and Brianna 4: A tough challenge. You've already addressed my main complaint (the unfairness of Craig's instant death attack) so all that remains is the question of whether, after the changes, the fight is reasonable for a party that hasn't done the cave dungeon. And I can't really answer that one

Wraith: Interesting unusual mechanics. I like the way that, counterintuitively, remaining at low HP is useful, and that this is achievable with Phoenix Dust, pretty cheap to obtain. Nepster points out that it's vulnerable to Regen, so perhaps that should be removed?

[Nepster]

Several comments on Proxima's suggestions

I mostly agree with his points in "General comments".

Maze dungeons, like the forest, the cave under Sturges, and the ice forest, were fun for me because I played them "normally". But having only random encounters means the player could trivialise the dungeons by escaping from every encounter (or equipping No Encounters once it's available), allowing them to get a lot of loot for free (or almost free, considering First Weapon, but he's not that hard). It's even possible to clear out the underwater temple and get a lot of good loot before completing the mountain.

I wouldn't recommend dealing with this by removing No Encounters, since that makes it much more comfortable to revisit old areas (and the ability appears at just the right time for that). Also, escaping from everything is still possible. Instead, I'd suggest having more touch encounters, as you did in the Nom Plant swamp and the Transient Lite dungeon, and never again after that.

What exactly do you suggest in your last sentence?
Anyway, perhaps one could even remove "No Encounters" and the ability to half the number of encounters. Of course one would need some way to be able to comfortable visit old areas. So why not disable random encounters entirely once the following two conditions are met:
- The main objective in that area is achieved. Mostly this would mean that the last boss in the area is defeated.
- All party members have reached the expected level set for this area. Of course this "expected level" should not be set as the average level when starting the dungeon, but to a point where the random fights mostly become pointless.

(The mountain has about as much variety as most maps, but it's also much larger, and it repeats some monsters from the Sturges caves.)

This depends on whether one has already done the Sturges caves. The difficulty of the repeats was pretty spot-on for my party (at least if they get some small resistances to status effects). But of course I don't have anything against more different monsters.

Abilities and AP: [...]

Given that that Cure is already a rather powerful curing spell, one probably doesn't even need Curona. The two cure spells afterwards (that I saw in Proxima's videos) seem entirely pointless. But I would like to have an all-party healing spell, that adds a relatively low amount of HP, similar to the Potion Jug. Ivy's Blessing should still recover much more HP (once you get to a level where you get this healing spell), but of course has the disadvantage to need at least two turns.

Mechanics that Proxima might not be aware of yet

I think the problem of having only few things to learn after level 40 isn't that much of a problem with the possibility to start whole new "professions". But with only 4 equippable abilities, the ability slots are far too precious to me to waste on "Use Blue Magic" or "Use Technique". Blue Magic is one of the weaker abilities due to the charge time and I have already two users of Techniques. Only Black Magic (and perhaps White Magic) might be useful in certain boss battles, but I wouldn't bother with them for random encounters. So I would suggest making them consumable items. Then they would be a lot more useful.

But my biggest gripe with the 1 Kx pricetag is that it gives away whether or not an item will ever be sold in shops.

This is in fact not totally correct. I have found one item, that can be bought in a shop, but only sold for 1 Kx.

Phantom 4: Excellent boss. But much harder than Warrior Fish and Golem, so why does it give less AP?

Because it is vulnerable to Regen, which does 9999 damage per turn and makes this fight trivial.

[Proxima]

What exactly do you suggest in your last sentence?

Touch encounters: RPG Maker jargon for visible events that trigger encounters when touched, like the Nom Plants and Transient Lites.

Anyway, perhaps one could even remove "No Encounters" and the ability to half the number of encounters. Of course one would need some way to be able to comfortable visit old areas. So why not disable random encounters entirely once the following two conditions are met:

Interesting idea, but it doesn't fully meet my objection. Since one can escape from any random encounter, dungeons that are just mazes with no puzzles and no touch encounters can be trivialised, allowing players to make off with all the loot for free.

* * *

A couple more points. I won't spoiler-tag these, as they refer to the very beginning of the game.

In the early game, Tara and Leanna don't have any tools other than "attack" or "attack with chance of status". There's some strategy in when to apply status, but the early game is still fairly monotonous. One possibility would be to give one of them a single-target ATK buff and the other a DEF buff; there is then a bit more strategy in that you have to decide whether to use these buffs, or try to inflict status, or just go all-out with attacks.

One of the tutorial NPCs in Caralint describes undead as "like having a permanent Zombie status", but this is before Zombie status has appeared or been explained. I'd prefer it if he just explained that being undead makes healing spells hurt, and then later, explain Zombie status as having the same effects as being undead. (Possibly, this explanation should appear in the description of Amanda's Curse, which is the first time Zombie status appears. Or introduce a monster that can cast Zombie in the forest.)

[ccexplore]

Since one can escape from any random encounter, dungeons that are just mazes with no puzzles and no touch encounters can be trivialised, allowing players to make off with all the loot for free.

It's a reasonable suggestion to compensate for this by adding more touch encounters like you suggested.  Personally I think a player who is over-reliant on escaping random encounters will already be missing out a lot (the random encounters are arguably a core part of the RPG experience, and you gain a lot of levels, experiences, etc. rewards from such encounters, which in turn affects your ability to deal with bosses), so trivializing the dungeon would probably just be yet another way they are ruining the game for themselves with their choices.

I would only add that if an area may be forced to be revisited in a later part of the game (but without introducing anything new in terms of monsters etc. so it's just basically forced walking), the part of the game when it is getting revisited, should preferably have much reduced touch encounters compared to earlier, since at that point it's arguably no longer about tackling the dungeon.

=========================

And +1 to Proxima's opinion on new vs old title.  Surely we can find a better title that is not so bland- and generic-sounding, but still accurate to the game (which was the main reason why the old title was discontinued).

[Proxima]

And +1 to Proxima's opinion on new vs old title.  Surely we can find a better title that is not so bland- and generic-sounding, but still accurate to the game (which was the main reason why the old title was discontinued).

I should mention that I completely sympathise with it being difficult to come up with a good title. The Descent of King Hesper, the currently ongoing DROD level set that I'm organising, went untitled for two and a half years before I came up with that one.

[namida]

Released a V019A update that fixes a bug that wasn't allowing save-anywhere on some save files. Links are the same as before, I just updated the ZIP files. If you've got the up-to-date one, it will have a text file mentioning this.



Found a bug that may affect some players. If you've beaten a very unusual boss fight, with a 9-letter name starting with M, and what you think you need to do next seems to be disabled...

Spoiler

That balloon near the boat shouldn't be there. Pretend it's not, at least for now.

It is possible to go about events in such an order that this bug never occurs, but I suspect the majority of players will do things in the order that does lead to this, as that's the order the game pushes you to do them in.

I don't see this as worthy of releasing another update just to fix, so I'm simply pointing it out. It'll be fixed in the next update.

[Nepster]

A few more bugs, with mild spoilers

1) If one has the Sensor equipped, it is not removed when updating to the new version. I sold it now, so this is a low-priority bug.
2) The blue-haired NPC in Sysona's pub says: "[...] You'll get the AP ba too. [...]" It seems there is a "ck" missing.
3) If one starts the balloon in the inn of Taspia, one gets placed at Nyatta on the world map. Similarly for other town combinations. Sometimes it looks like that you start with the balloon, where you landed previously, not where you entered the balloon now.
4) If you return to repaired Saria via the Metaspe, you still access the destroyed Saria. Note that the east jail exit is blocked, but the west one isn't.
5) I had now several fights, where Harley never participated but got EXP. This is not caused by any of his abilities, but I have no clue what else could cause that. It works perfectly fine for all other characters as far as I can tell.

Edit: Added one more bug to the list.

[namida]

Another bug. Read only once you've either fought (not necesserially defeated) a Specimen, or obtained a Lab Key, unless you don't care about mechanics spoilers (there are no plot spoilers).

Spoiler

The rooms containing the Specimens should not be accessible until the Lab Key is obtained. Because they currently open even without the key, the key appears to be useless, but that's its intended function. This is relatively minor - the key is obtained in the same area, and if you can even access a Specimen fight, you can almost certianly manage anything you'd have to fight to get the key.

While this one is a tad more significant, I still feel it can wait until the next update.



The bug Nepster mentioned, and Proxima also noted in one video, ...

Spoiler

... specifically, that you get Tara's graphic rather than a boat graphic after the Leviathan fight ...

... is now also fixed. This was quite a tricky one; I'm still not entirley sure what caused it, I just found a workaround that seems to work.

Anyone who the previous one isn't a spoiler for, has probably at least *guessed* at (if not outright discovered) anything that this will spoil

While there's no confirmation since no one's defeated him yet, I suspect the same thing will occur after the Suzaku fight too, so I implemented the workaround there too.

[namida]

An idea I'm considering and would like input on. I'm not sure how to spoiler-tag this in a way that makes it clear what it's about without the warning itself being a spoiler (it is only mechanics spoilers, not plot ones, though; but it is possibly one of the largest mechanics spoilers in the game), but I can say that this won't be a spoiler for either Nepster or Proxima. It's possible to play through all current content without this ever becoming a not-spoiler though, so read with caution. If you've completed the content in the current demo and have been making a point of finding optional stuff, this will probably not be a spoiler for you.

Spoiler

Specifically, this is about the abilities that let you use extra types of skills (eg. Use Technique, Use Special).

I'm considering adding a dedicated extra equip slot just for these. This extra slot would not be usable for anything else; and likewise, these abilities would not be possible to equip in a normal slot.

The upside to this would be that you don't need to use up an equipment slot to add an extra skill type; the downside is that you can no longer have two extra skill types on a single character at the same time (though you could still switch which type they have, including with in-battle equipment switching - although this could also be reconsidered, with it instead becoming a permanent thing that you only get to choose once). Of course, every character would still permanently have their normal skill type.

To those who are wondering about how I can do this after I mentioned that I can't add extra ability slots later in the game - it's very easy to add an extra permanent, always-existing slot like this. It's just not very easy to dynamically add extra slots mid-game. (The idea of adding slots mid-game is still something I would like to look into, but I doubt it will happen unless / until I do a full remake with a custom engine.) And we can now scratch that because I figured out a way to do it! Of course, that doesn't mean for sure I will, but it does mean I can at least consider this option now - possibly still in combination with the above.

[Proxima]

Thoughts on the above. Same spoiler warning applies. (Don't read unless, at the very least, you've reached and thoroughly explored Sysona.)

Spoiler

We've just been discussing this in chat, but I want to set out my thoughts in a post anyway, to make them clearer.

Around the time you get Trainer abilities, equipment slots become very tight; and even more so when Turbo abilities are purchasable. I want to make the most of these by having EXP Turbo constantly on, and AP Turbo for those party members for whom AP is still relevant, and keep the Trainers equipped. That leaves only one slot, which pretty much has to go to HP+100%. So I don't get to try out a lot of things that might be cool, like Double Cut (I tried this for a bit, but then had to unequip it).

Also -- as Nepster mentioned, and I referred to glancingly in my video series -- it's possible to turn the Trainer abilities into a complete game-breaker by constantly switching them around so that multiple party members benefit each level. (Then again, the player can always break the game if they want, so perhaps it's not so important to consider this.)

There are a few different ways you might deal with this:

(1) Leave this as-is, just as something the player has to work out the best way around.

(2) Don't sell Turbo abilities, keep it at just one EXP Turbo and one AP Turbo in the whole game. (Rejected in the chat discussion.)

(3) As suggested above, have a dedicated equip slot for the "use skills" abilities. In this case, I would suggest also making the Trainer abilities belong to this new slot. That would prevent stacking multiple Trainers on the next character to level up, but would allow combining Trainers with four other abilities.

It's true that it would prevent stacking two "use skills" abilities; but I don't see many players wanting to do that in any case, as it would take for ever to get enough AP on one character to make it worthwhile.

(4) Instead of making "new type of skills" abilities take up a slot, make them consumable items. This would mean you'd have to make the choice once and for all, but, again, you're unlikely to do anything else because of the AP system. And similarly, you could make Trainer abilities consumable items, which would prevent abuse and free up an equip slot. The disadvantage is that it's much harder to make once-and-for-all choices for Trainers, especially since the player should learn about "use skills" abilities some time after finding the Trainers. So I'm not wild about this option.

(5) Also as suggested above, keep the initial four equip slots (or even go down to three) and allow the player to acquire up to six later on. I like namida's suggestion (from chat) that at certain points in the game, you meet an NPC who sells the additional slots, but only one per party member, so you have to find a second NPC later (or a third, if you start with three slots). I'd suggest locating these NPCs at:
3 -> 4: Mysterious shop on the road to Taspia
4 -> 5: Hunting club
5 -> 6: Sysona

Namida suggests leaving 6 until the entrance to the final dungeon, but I think that would be a mistake. Sysona is where the player really wants it (EXP Turbo is purchasable, all Trainers can be found before then), and depriving the player of the slot just means they can't fit in things that would be interesting to try out. So, in short, this is probably my favourite suggestion, followed by (3).

Counterargument: In my playthrough, I found the Transient boss very difficult and needed all four slots to get past it. Possibly this boss could be rebalanced to be more appropriate for a party with only three slots.

[namida]

Regarding Proxima's run,

Spoiler

I was quite surprised to see a brute-force strategy work out well on the Specimens. But you should have looked at their status resistances... they're vunerable to both Sleep and Silence.

[namida]

As I mentioned in chat, the only thing left before I can make the next release is some more testing.

Progress:

Spoiler tagged just in case. Only details it reveals are how many new optional bosses, how many new storyline bosses, and how many new areas are in the next update (it doesn't reveal anything about *what* these new things are, just quantities).

New optional bosses:
-- 5 of 5 tested for correct event behaviour surrounding the battle
-- 5 of 5 tested for correct AI functionality in-battle
-- 5 of 5 tested for difficulty balance

New storyline bosses:
-- 4 of 4 tested for correct event behaviour surrounding the battle
-- 4 of 4 tested for correct AI functionality in-battle
-- 4 of 4 tested for difficulty balance

New areas:
-- 1 of 2 tested for correct event behaviour etc
-- 1 of 2 tested for difficulty balance

Other:
-- Nothing else remains to be tested

Current ETA: Within the next 24 hours

[namida]

V020 update is here at last!

This adds both some new storyline content and some new optional content. There's also bugfixes (as usual), as well as that you now start with three slots, but throughout the course of the game can expand that to six. There have also been some minor tweaks, as usual.

Fresh install: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e5xm0jxnlcmsf9y/LoaO_V020_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpxpn1m0c5hnvnc/LoaO_V020_Upgrade.zip?dl=1

[Proxima]

A couple of issues:

Spoiler

On loading an old save, the message should tell players where to get 3->4 ability slots, so they don't have to look over the whole world. (I know where to get 4->5, since we discussed it in chat, but it seems I have to get 3->4 first to unlock it....)

With the NPC who offers to refund AP, if you hit Esc, she will react as if you selected someone.

Outside the haunted mansion in Taspia, it's possible to get stuck for a very long time if the slow-moving NPC blocks you. I suggest adding more space.

[namida]

I was meaning to add the note on where to get 3 -> 4 but must have forgotten. Though I was going to make it conditional on already reaching that point.

Spoiler

The NPC in the Taspia ability shop.

You should still be able to use the other upgrade anyways. It's more like two different +1s, rather than specifically 3 to 4 and 4 to 5.

Will look into the other two.

[namida]

Quotes from Proxima's post

With the NPC who offers to refund AP, if you hit Esc, she will react as if you selected someone.

Fixed.

On loading an old save, the message should tell players where to get 3->4 ability slots, so they don't have to look over the whole world. (I know where to get 4->5, since we discussed it in chat, but it seems I have to get 3->4 first to unlock it....)

Done. Although this will only pop up for people who jump directly from V19 to V21 (or V20a if applicable). It will also point out that Vince doesn't need this upgrade, if the player is far enough in the game to have him.

[Nepster]

Some more bug reports

1) Alicia's Bliss still does heal much more than just 999 HP (last time I checked, it was around 3000). Similarly her Faith does restore more than 99 MP (last time I checked, it was around 400).
2) In the Security part of the Cult base, I always get an error at the very end: Unable to find the graphic "Warbot". Then the game crashes.
3) In the Security part of the Cult base, you can move on top of the walls directly next to the entrance: Go to the main hall of the base, enter the Security zone, then move one step west, then one step south and then to the east and you move onto the wall.

[namida]

Spoiler

1. If she has Ultra Damage equipped, that's why. It has the hidden effect of adding an extra digit to Bliss / Faith's damage cap, which is technically just like it does with most other attacks. Arguably, this is consistent for Bliss, but not for Faith. Not sure if I want to keep this permanently, but I want to leave it in a bit longer (until I decide for sure). Though even then, it should be a bit weaker than in previous versions. (EDIT: No, I've decided I want to change this.)

2 and 3. Will look into. 2 may be the "remove unused battler sprites" code having a bug. The cult base tileset is a bit buggy, though any issues of this kind are pretty easy to fix.

[namida]

Patch for the game-breaking bug (as well as some of the more minor ones) is now uploaded. Same links; there will be an empty "V020A.txt" text file to identify the updated ZIP.

[Nepster]

Some feedback on the recently added parts

Sysona Woods:
Very vast forest, that is not trivial to navigate at all. The random encounters vary very much in difficulty: The Dinosore is something to flee of (after trying to steal of course), the Trololos are pretty tough but managable while almost all other monsters are pretty weak.

Cult Temple:
Nice dungeon layout and nice idea to use cultists wandering around instead of random encounters. The Cult Assassins are too easy in my opinion. Whlle they have an instant-death attack, this is more annoying than dangerous.
SPECIMEN: Quite interesting fights. My strategy was to always keep it asleep, with magical attacks targeted at my member with the reflector, to bypass the monster's relector shield.
CULT TECHNICIAN: Excellent fight. One has to be really careful to keep the weakest member alive, while he has rather powerful attacks.
OBLEROST: Another boss that at the very end suddenly comes with an attack that kills the whole party: Atomic Blast, doing 4500 damage to everyone, which is more than some of my characters (around level 50) equipped with HP+100% have! And even Reflect doesn't protect againts this.
Up to this point the robot wasn't really a problem: The physical attack is managable, and reviving party members that got killed due to Thunderia wasn't a problem either.

Sysona Woods (again):
SHINRYU: One has to be slightly lucky not to get Shimmering Rain on the very first turn until one had the chance to cast Wall on at least one character. The next goal is get all important party members with Haste, Shield and Aura. After that Ivy's Blessing spell means that only the Erase ability is nasty any more.
MIA: With two white mages casting Revive and Haste this was easier that I suspected at first.

Cult Base:
The random encounters were quite easy at my level.
HYPERCUBE: Interesting mechnics. First wait for the cube to cast Hellspawn, then cast Hellspawn oneself and Regen on the cube. After that essentially only defend and revive fallen characters.
PHANTOM V: Extremely easy fight - it just exploded on its first turn!
AUTOMANIC: The first Atomic Blast came by surprise and this is probably the only dangerous attack it has. As it seems to do exactly MaxHP-1 damage, I let Harley cast Curona before every monster turn, to keep the Buffs on my party (though it would probably been easier to cast Regen instead). This way the fight was pretty easy.
LUNARION: Not that hard actually, once my two white mages hasted everyone and I equipped Dispelstrike to remove it's boosts faster than it could put them on. I never encountered for what it was storing its energy, because it went down before the next turn. Some of the moves were pretty useless: The Lunarpuffs tried time and again to put Zombie on Harley when he had Multiproof equipped and Lunarion used Curia on itself which regenerated only 186HP.
And I wodner what happened to the dead cultist after the Lunarion battle? Coda killed him just before the battle, and the body disappeared...

Optional bosses:
NEO CERBERUS: Not too hard with two White Magicians casting Haste and Wall on everyone. This way even a double-flare can be survived. And it wastes too many (of its rather few) turns with Curia. Plague or the Haste/Shield/Aura move are a lot more effective, but it almost never uses those.
TRANSIENT PLUS: I got there around level 55. The first two rounds (with a direct attack and a Pulse) were used to Wall everyone and use Vince and Alicia to buff the whole party. Then everyone defended for the first Trauma. The round after Trauma was used to haste everyone (with Ivy healing via Blessing). From now on I always had a few turns to do damage before everyone had to defend again, though it used mainly Pulso from now on.
ADRIOLL: My usual strategy works here, too: Use Harley and Leanna to give everyone Haste and Wall. Here, too, Vince buffed Spirit to be on the safe side, but after this the battle was essentially won.
I haven't seen Rollerblaster from it, so perhaps it should use it somewhat more regularly? And what is "Recalibrating it senses" doing?
PROTOLOCK: Extremely nasty boss! The arms are more annoying than anything else (at least after being slowed), but the Breaker Blast is comes to killing my whole party and removes all statuses and buffs. So I basically had Harley (with Auto-Haste), Ivy (with Auto-Regen) and Leanna (with Use White Magic) constantly healing the party while only Alicia did any damage. Even with that it would have killed my party if the main part just had a little bit more HP.

[namida]

Nepster's post

Up to this point the robot wasn't really a problem: The physical attack is managable, and reviving party members that got killed due to Thunderia wasn't a problem either.

I've made him more difficult for future updates. In fact, I think the latest update already includes this adjustment.

PHANTOM V: Extremely easy fight - it just exploded on its first turn!

Yep. And if you want to see what happens if you defeat him before that, see Proxima's videos.

LUNARION: Not that hard actually, once my two white mages hasted everyone and I equipped Dispelstrike to remove it's boosts faster than it could put them on. I never encountered for what it was storing its energy, because it went down before the next turn. Some of the moves were pretty useless: The Lunarpuffs tried time and again to put Zombie on Harley when he had Multiproof equipped and Lunarion used Curia on itself which regenerated only 186HP.

Nice idea using Dispelstrike. I relied on Reflecting him instead so he couldn't apply them in the first place - though during the Flare phase, he'll target himself with Flare if he's under Reflect, so it is important to keep an eye on this. (Note that rather than allowing his buff spells to reflect to your party, he simply won't cast them if he's under Reflect.)
Regarding Curia healing for so little - firstly, that's actually the Lunopuffs doing that, not Lunarion himself. But anyway, it should heal more; this is fixed for the next update.
Storing Energy comes before a particularly nasty Disaster spell, which will generally hit everyone for (sorry, couldn't resist) OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!

And [Neo Cerberus] wastes too many (of its rather few) turns with Curia. Plague or the Haste/Shield/Aura move are a lot more effective, but it almost never uses those.

Curia and Triple Howl both heal for 9999. Triple Howl has the advantages of potentially giving Haste / Shield / Aura, while Curia has the advantage that it can be used as one of the moves in his three-moves-in-a-row combos (Triple Howl on the other hand takes up the entire turn - as does Plague, for that matter).

TRANSIENT PLUS: I got there around level 55. The first two rounds (with a direct attack and a Pulse) were used to Wall everyone and use Vince and Alicia to buff the whole party. Then everyone defended for the first Trauma. The round after Trauma was used to haste everyone (with Ivy healing via Blessing). From now on I always had a few turns to do damage before everyone had to defend again, though it used mainly Pulso from now on.

His pattern is Attack > Pulse > Trauma > Trauma > Pulse, with any one of those three at random on his 6th turn. Then he repeats. He also uses Pulse as a counterattack to certain moves (damaging items is one case).

ADRIOLL: My usual strategy works here, too: Use Harley and Leanna to give everyone Haste and Wall. Here, too, Vince buffed Spirit to be on the safe side, but after this the battle was essentially won.
I haven't seen Rollerblaster from it, so perhaps it should use it somewhat more regularly? And what is "Recalibrating it senses" doing?

The recalibrating has no actual effect. It's essentially just giving the player a free round.
What Adrioll uses is dependant on its HP. While above half, it's a 50/50 chance of physical or Flare; while under half, it's a 66/33 chance of Rollerblaster or Curia (with the recalibrating being a higher-priority, every X turns thing). So if you didn't see Rollerblaster, either it was due to luck, or because you got through the second half of his HP too quickly for him to ever use it.
Adrioll is meant to be a bit easier than the other new optional bosses, due to being accessible earlier in the game: Whereas the other new ones aren't accessible until after the Cult Factory; Adrioll is accessible after the Eastern Ranges.

PROTOLOCK: Extremely nasty boss!

*laughs suspiciously*

[namida]

My plan for the next update is to include about half of the Mayae Ranges sidequest, as well as about half of the next dungeon. The last remaining "not yet accessible" area will probably come in the update after that, as will the rest of the next dungeon.

If anyone happens to have a save (that isn't from a low-level game or similar) from...

Spoiler

as close as possible to when you get the boat; at the latest, just after Alicia's flashback sequence, and ideally with Monster Hunter sidequest progress that, at most, goes as far as beating Electro Guy

...it'd be great if you can send that to me. If not, I'll just rely on testing with a somewhat "mockup" party at roughly the right levels for now, and leave in-depth testing until the game's content is more or less complete.

In terms of progress, so far the parts of the Mayae Ranges that I plan to include are 80% complete (just need to difficulty test with a party that's appropriately levelled for the point in the game where it becomes available; designing and event-testing is all done), and the parts of the next dungeon that I plan to include are either 0% complete or about 5% complete, depending on where exactly I decide to put a currently-WIP boss (in particular, there's another specific boss fight that I want in the second half of the dungeon, and I'm not sure if I want this WIP one to be before or after it. If I go with "before", this one will be the last boss in the first half of the dungeon).



Update:

Mayae Ranges still not balance-tested yet. I've been feeling in the mood to create stuff a lot the last few days, so I figure I'm better off saving testing until a time when I'm not in such a creative mood (or when all content I intend to include in the next update is done; whatever comes first).

In terms of the storyline dungeon that I'm planning to half-complete for the next update, I'd say it's about 60% done design-wise now, but has had very little testing so far (mostly just some testing of enemy AI).



Update again:

Most of this dungeon is done now. Still needs most of the testing to be done, though. There is one (non-optional) side section that I haven't started yet because I'm not sure yet what I want to do with it; I also need to come up with (both idea-wise and implementation-wise) a boss to put in this section too. Aside from this section and testing, the only remaining thing is to write the AI for the end boss of this segment.

[namida]

I had been hoping to get the new update out before the weekend, but have been quite busy and tired the last couple of days. As such I haven't done much more progress since last time I mentioned where I was up to.

I probably won't have too much chance to work on it over the weekend, so ETA is now early next week, I'd say most likely around midday Monday UTC (but this still is not guaranteed; and for that matter, nor is it certian that it *won't* be sooner than this, just unlikely).

[namida]

As expected, didn't get anything done over the weekend. But just now, I've made the missing section (including the boss). I still need to test (edit: event testing done, but still need to do balance testing), and write the AI for the end boss of the segment.

I also found and fixed two bugs relating to Reflect status that I'm very surprised have gone unnoticed: Firstly that enemy counterattacks completely bypass reflect even when they shouldn't (not sure how this went unnoticed, though it may be that many (though not all) enemies that use reflectable counterattacks are also aware of reflect and will use something else (or target someone else) if their counterattack would have been reflected otherwise); and secondly was that auto-reflect doesn't always get restored after something is reflected by it - this appears to happen more often for party members, but can happen for enemies too.

[namida]

Alright, the next part of the adventure is finally here! As well as more of the storyline, about half of the Mayae Ranges sidequest is also now playable.

V021:
Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/et4p6a73ozoffgj/LoaO_V021_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7nbh7lsmrhhaf5g/LoaO_V021_Upgrade.zip?dl=1

Enjoy.

[namida]

V022 update. This is fairly minor; it adds the rest of the Mayae Ranges sidequest, as well as a few AI tweaks to some of the new storyline bosses from V021 (no changes to their stats, just to their AI).

Please note that the upgrade link is only intended for use if you're currently on V021. If you're on anything earlier, please redownload the fresh install copy instead (don't worry, you'll still keep your save files as long as you just extract it over your existing copy).

Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8zt79cmha0rfhuq/LoaO_V022_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqech49d89rfkxy/LoaO_V022_Upgrade.zip?dl=1 (from V021 only; otherwise please download the fresh copy)

[namida]

Spoiler

[namida]

I've just reached the point where all storyline content (excluding parts of the final-bosses / post-final-bosses cutscenes) has been made! Testing still remains to be done on it, though.

Some optional content still remains to create. Some of it will be available in the next update; other content will come in a further update (this "coming even later" content is intended to be post-game level content, so don't worry about being overlevelled).



At this point, remaining content for next update:

May contain spoilers for existing content; does not contain any *significant* spoilers about upcoming content

- Ending (post-final-boss) cutscenes still need to be made
- Remainder of final dungeon needs to be difficulty tested
- Rest of Monster Hunter bosses need to be added
- One more optional boss may be added

There's one more piece of optional content that remains to do after this, which is intended for a postgame party and will come in a later update.

Spoiler

I'm speaking of course about the strange building near Saria that doesn't do anything so far.

[namida]

Okay, all storyline content is now created! (Though none of the new stuff has been balance-tested, and the post-final-boss cutscene has not yet been event tested either.)

Aside from the testing, I still need to add some more Monster Hunter bosses before the update is ready for release.

[namida]

Been playing too much Crash Bandicoot the last few days, so haven't made any further progress with testing since what I mentioned in chat the other day (which is a bit further than I've mentioned in this topic; storyline-wise, only the last two bosses and the cutscene after them remain untested, and the bosses only need difficulty testing, their AI testing is completed).

[namida]

Where did Ivy's BP meter go? And how will she use Blue Magic without it (or will she be able to at all)? Well, you'll get to find out when you complete the Monster Hunter sidequest, which will be possible in the next update.

(The incorrect background for this battle has nothing to do with any new stuff; it's just because this screenshot was taken in battle test mode.)

[namida]

So - as I mentioned in chat - the storyline is now 100% complete and tested!

There's still some sidequest stuff I want to implement before the next update, though. This is just some Monster Hunter bosses, so shouldn't be a particularly time-consuming task, once I get a chance where I'm in the right mindset for it (and have the time to do so). As I've mentioned, the sidequest relating to that building near Saria will come in a later update - it's intended for very-high-level parties, so don't worry about overlevelling if you're planning on playing it.

[namida]

At this stage, all that remains is a little bit of testing and a few bugfixes - the remaining Monster Hunter bosses have now been created. All going well, I should have it ready sometime today, at last. Probably tomorrow at the latest.

EDIT: All tested now! But there are a couple more minor things I need to implement or test (relating to some minor rebalancing, mostly) before releasing.

[namida]

Okay, you've waited long enough.

Here is the V023 update, which now allows you to play through the entire storyline, as well as all but one of the sidequests (which will come in the V024 update).

Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ny26x1yyb589v63/LoaO_V023_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jdlvk8tpk181pju/LoaO_V023_Upgrade.zip?dl=1 (from V021 or higher only; otherwise please download the fresh copy)

Changelog

NEW CONTENT
-----------
The entire storyline is now playable
The remainder of the Monster Hunter sidequest is now playable
Four new equippable abilities have been added, though one is currently inaccessible

CHANGES
-------
Multi Resist and Multiproof now include Virus and Slow (but still not Death)
Multiproof is no longer buyable; most shops that had it now offer Multi Resist (if they didn't already)
Ultra Damage is no longer obtainable in the Sysona Forest
The Ability Shop in Nyatta gains a few extra abilities once the events in Yuvia are completed
Some enemies that previously had no steal items, now do

FIXED BUGS
----------
(I don't necceserially take note of every bug as I fix it, so there may be more than this)
When regular physicals are used as a counterattack, the animation is not displayed
A certain Water-elemental optional boss takes normal damage from Water instead of absorbing it
Fighting a few battles inbetween Monster Hunter bosses becoming available isn't required
Some optional bosses became available later than intended
Half BP Cost does nothing

[Nepster]

Here are some bugs

1) After Yauwe/Tamiku, if you use one switch and then pass to the other party, the other half has no way to get to a yellow star to switch again. So it has to teleport back to the beginning, but as some pathways are missing in the middle, one has no other recourse than to recall the other half of the party, too. This is very annoying!
2) Go to the chamber after Yauwe/Tamiku where you hear Xeon and then go back upstairs. Now you can no longer go down again.
3) When I went down the long path from the central hub, I got the message "You need the Gold Medal to pass". Then I went there after the Yauwe/Tamika fight, and I could pass until "When nothing else prevents you" (directly before the end) - even without having the Gold Medal.
4) If you combine "Use Black Magic", "MP Direct" and "One MP Cost", the Black Magic spells are completely free!
5) I certainly think that "MP Direct", "One MP Cost" giving the ability to cast Glory in one turn just for 1 MP is far too overpowered.
6) I can cast "Smokescreen" and "Crippling Strike" via the character menu. This doesn't make any sense.
7) Getting though the splitting part was fun once, but it's now becoming tedious to check back on the hunting club or to transform some of my Turbo Boosts, ... into Auto abilities in Sysona. Perhaps disable the party splitting and add all platforms after defeating Yauwe/Tamiku?
8) Triumph does heal first, then removes statuses. So when a player has Virus, it doesn't heal at all and just removes the infection. This might be intended, but it feels a bit weak for such a costly and high-end spell.
9) Immunify doesn't prevent infections by virus. Not sure whether this is intended or not.

And one remark regarding the Mayae ranges

When you encounter this part for the first time, you are not given any information to as to which flames should get extinguished. But apart from three flames that don't matter, there seems to be a unique set of flames that have to be extinguished in order to get to the central temple. This combination makes it very unlikely that anyone (even being careful) will reach the choice-chest at the end without it being already empty. So one has to revert to a previous save in order to even see what one has missed there...
I am all in favor of rewarding clever players, but missing an extremely valuable items like Multiproof or Auto-Regen simply due to bad luck doesn't seem fair to me.

EDIT & EDIT 2: Added two more bugs.

[namida]

Re: Bugs

1) The potential for this kind of situation is precisely why the Warp Sphere was added, even though I wasn't aware of any specific setup that would lead to one - I just thought assuming it was impossible was a bad idea, and seems that was a good judgement on my part. Actually, once you leave the Master Chamber via the rear exit, it adds the option to teleport to *that* side too. But I'll add some switch tiles, most likely in the rooms where Yauwe and Tamiku were fought, to address this.

2) Will look into it.

3) Will look into this too. This one is particularly important, because the optional boss at the end of that is not even meant to be revealed yet, and is (obviously) in a very incomplete state. It should actually require another item too that isn't yet accessible, as well. I also have no idea why defeating Yauwe and Tamiku would affect this.

4) And this one.

5) Yeah, I should make One MP Cost not affect Blue Magic when MP Direct is in effect.

6) Will look into it.

7) See response to #1.

8) I actually added specific code to avoid this for Zombie; but seems I forgot to do the same for Virus.

9) Virus has often been excluded from general "all statuses" stuff - Multiproof didn't cover it either until the latest update. So it isn't a bug, but it might be something I want to change.

Re: Mayae Ranges

Keep in mind that the Mayae Ranges are available very early (relatively). It *should* be hard, and require either experimentation (and the foresight to keep a spare save) or luck to get these high-tier items from it, in my opinion. If it was easier, I probably would not want to put a Multiproof there (Auto-Regen would still probably be okay).

[Nepster]

Bugs and comments on namida's reply

1) Please let Aisha tell the party that you can teleport to the far side now. I went through there a few times and never noticed this.
3) This is actually worse: Now that I have defeated all Monster Hut bosses and have the Gold Medal, I can reach this optinal boss (an get wiped out by its Atomic Blast).
10) When starting Xeon, the status effects from Auto-Abilities are not there. They are only put on after the first move.
11) While Judgement deals around 50000-70000 damage, Zanmato only gives about 3000-5000 damage (both in Ivy's hands against end-game bosses). The first seems a bit high (at least for the cost of 1MP), while the second one is pretty low. This might be due to the specific bosses' resistances, but it certainly seemed odd...
12) I sometimes saw Aisha in the "next characters" bar of Xeon's fight, but she never seemed to do anything.

Comments on bosses till the very end

SLUDGEON: After realizing that the Sludgeon counter-attacks, this was pretty easy.
RELICA: In the beginning I put Wall and a double Spirit buff on everyone. Then Alicia equipped Silencetouch and tried to Silence Relica, while everyone got Hasted. In hasted state I could do more damage to the Ankh than it could cure and finally Alicia succeeded in silencing Relica. Thus I didn't even get to see Triumph at the end...
I know that the fight would have been easier by putting Infection on Relica, but I *hate* infection and try to avoid it whenever possible.
ANCIENT OBBIE: Pretty easy.
ANCIENT TRANSIENT: Very long fight, but not overly hard. Walls prevent Trauma-damage pretty well and Faith restores the lost MP. All other attacks are not really problematic at level 55-57.
MINACELL: Extremely long fight. Even hasted I managed only two or three hits on the boss per respawning round. The second-hardest boss in the final dungeon.
GRALLIET II: After testing a little bit, I realized that it was harmed by healing spells. So two Full-Cures took care of it.
C&B V: This was surprisingly managable. Brianna was occupied with Tara's Dispelstrike and Slowstrike and casted Haste on a lot of her turns. My two white mages casted Wall and Haste on everyone while Alicia buffed them. This way I could withstand their (now infrequent) attacks. Finally I slowly switched in Ivy and Amanda (and buffed them). Ivy's crippling strike was surpringly effective while Amanda (equipped with Deathproof) casted Flare on Craig. Having learned from the previous fight, I tried to reduce the health of both simutanously, so that a second improved phase wouldn't last long. But this didn't seem to be necessary this time.
PHANTOM VI: Again the first task was preparing for the nasty Plague and Disaster attacks: Two white mages casting Haste and Wall, Alicia casting buffs and Ivy casting Plague to Slow the Phantom and then Immunizing everyone against Plague. This way the attacks were at least survivable. Then I casted Reflect on everyone to prepare for Disaster - and now the Phantom did 140000 damage to itself!
YAUWE: After surviving the first Hellspawn, it got a lot easier, because Holy did far less damage.
TAMIKU: The main problem here was dealing enough damage, as my main damage dealers were in the other party and Aisha's Flare didn't do as much as I expected (compared to Amanda's Flare).
CODA: That Virus+Trauma combination is nasty, though only the beginning is very difficult. Once a few characters are buffed up, things became easier with a hasted Ivy's Triumph healing the infections.
CORELOCK: The beginning was pretty easy and arms were pretty easy due to Judgement. With three Auto-Walls the remaining part wasn't that bad either... The Corelock fell apart on one of my turns. Does this mean I whittled down all its HP or did I just survive long enough? It seemed to last only very, very few rounds once its arms have been defeated.
LUNARIS: Argh! Again this possession! So I had to move Vince in to have him possessed, because he is the least dangerous. The rest was a rather long fight. Especially annoying was the combo of first reducing everyone to 1HP and then putting all the status buffs on. I always killed the possessed Vince in between and then had none to remove all these buffs... By far the hardest battle in the final dungeon.
XEON: The first four incarnations were trivially done each with two Judgements. The next four needed slightly more, but never got close to actually hurting my party which was by now fully buffed up. This was actually a pretty disappointing fight.

WARBUGS: Nice bumping ability. But a hasted Tara with Sleepstrike kept the bugs so busy bumping themselves that they almost never attacked.
FLUCKSHINT: Fortunately one can silence this thing... After that the party can survive its attacks.

Some general comments

1) At the end of the game I was around levels 64-67.
2) I played through the final dungeon with only one Multiproof, the one Ultra-Damage one gets from C&B there and no use of 1MP-Glory. But I made liberal use of the high-damage Judgement, Virus-healing Triumph and Solidity, each for 1MP.
3) The Nuisancer is a real nuisance!
4) I like the Malcantore with the Trauma-Virus combo. This is nicely challenging (and a good training for Coda).
5) Only at the final dungeon I noticed how useful Split Attack, Static resp. G-Force are for random encounters. 
6) It is very fortunate that hardly any monster can remove the player's Wall and Haste. This gave me such a good advantage, that this was my standard approach for all boss fights. On the other hand such positive statuses didn't last long on monsters due to the excellent ability Dispelstrike.
7) Can we have the music of the C&B V fight more often? I like it even better than the random battle and the boss battle music.

[namida]

Bugs (from earlier post)

1) After Yauwe/Tamiku, if you use one switch and then pass to the other party, the other half has no way to get to a yellow star to switch again. So it has to teleport back to the beginning, but as some pathways are missing in the middle, one has no other recourse than to recall the other half of the party, too. This is very annoying!

Added switch stars in the rooms where Yauwe and Tamiku were.

2) Go to the chamber after Yauwe/Tamiku where you hear Xeon and then go back upstairs. Now you can no longer go down again.

This is another case of "It works, it's just slightly buggy". If you stand on the ladder and press Enter (or any key with the equivalent function), you'll be warped back downstairs - it's just configured not to automatically activate the event. Fixed for next update, either way.

3) When I went down the long path from the central hub, I got the message "You need the Gold Medal to pass". Then I went there after the Yauwe/Tamika fight, and I could pass until "When nothing else prevents you" (directly before the end) - even without having the Gold Medal.

As I thought, Yauwe / Tamiku had nothing to do with it. Rather, defeating the final fight against Phantom is what triggers this - there's one tile that's meant to check for Proof of Persistance. However, the ones that say Gold Medal and Champion's Decree (the latter of which is not yet obtainable in the current version), also check for Proof of Persistance, instead of the item they're meant to. Fixed for next update; might dummy out the event at the end too just in case (since I'll probably release a bugfix update).

4) If you combine "Use Black Magic", "MP Direct" and "One MP Cost", the Black Magic spells are completely free!

Fixed. The cause of this was that the game checks "Does the character have MP Direct equipped? If so, replace the skill's MP cost with double its BP cost." Completely overlooking the existance of skills that have zero BP costs, which is most of them. Actually, this would apply to everything that requires MP, not just Black Magic (nor is the respective Use ____ ability needed; you could just set this up on a character that knows the skill type naturally).

5) I certainly think that "MP Direct", "One MP Cost" giving the ability to cast Glory in one turn just for 1 MP is far too overpowered.

Agreed. I've made a modification to how MP Direct and One MP Cost interact; the BP cost is now added to the MP cost* after the effects of Half/One MP Cost are applied. (And no, you can't just substitute One BP Cost, even ignoring the fact that One BP Cost and MP Direct are mutually exclusively obtainable - MP Direct is not affected by the BP Cost abilities either.)
* In practice, any skill that has a nonzero MP cost has a zero BP cost and vice versa; but theoretically one that costs both could exist.

6) I can cast "Smokescreen" and "Crippling Strike" via the character menu. This doesn't make any sense.

Fixed.

7) Getting though the splitting part was fun once, but it's now becoming tedious to check back on the hunting club or to transform some of my Turbo Boosts, ... into Auto abilities in Sysona. Perhaps disable the party splitting and add all platforms after defeating Yauwe/Tamiku?

Rather than this, I'll tie it to the cutscene afterwards. But anyway, I've added something like this; it doesn't outright prevent splitting but now asks the player if they'd like to split rather than forcing it. No change is made to anything in the puzzle.

8) Triumph does heal first, then removes statuses. So when a player has Virus, it doesn't heal at all and just removes the infection. This might be intended, but it feels a bit weak for such a costly and high-end spell.

Fixed for Virus. As mentioned, Triumph already has no problem handling Zombie.

9) Immunify doesn't prevent infections by virus. Not sure whether this is intended or not.

I've added immunity to Virus to it.

More-recent post

1) Please let Aisha tell the party that you can teleport to the far side now. I went through there a few times and never noticed this.

Not quite Aisha saying it, but I have added a message that will alert the player to this ability.

10) When starting Xeon, the status effects from Auto-Abilities are not there. They are only put on after the first move.

Will need to look into why. I also notice this happens with Lunaris too (but NOT with Corelock).

11) While Judgement deals around 50000-70000 damage, Zanmato only gives about 3000-5000 damage (both in Ivy's hands against end-game bosses). The first seems a bit high (at least for the cost of 1MP), while the second one is pretty low. This might be due to the specific bosses' resistances, but it certainly seemed odd...

Won't be doable for 1MP anymore. At any rate, a big reason for this is because Zanmato is a physical attack, and Ivy's strength is MUCH lower than her magic. This is also why Trauma seems quite pathetic in her hands, especially in the early-game; it's also physical. Another very significant reason is that Judgement isn't affected by Spirit; whereas Zanmato is affected by Defence. Compare against a target with Weaken (Meltdown doesn't matter) for more accurate comparisons. (Now on the other hand, Zanmato in Alicia's hands...)

12) I sometimes saw Aisha in the "next characters" bar of Xeon's fight, but she never seemed to do anything.

Similar to how Xeon invisibly provides support for Yauwe, Tamiku, Coda and Lunaris; in this battle Aisha invisibly provides support for you. She'll heal (Curona or Full-Cure depending on the situation), revive and remove status effects. She can only do this a certain number of times though - but she deals some very major damage to Xeon as her final move.

Some responses to boss feedback

MINACELL: Extremely long fight. Even hasted I managed only two or three hits on the boss per respawning round. The second-hardest boss in the final dungeon.

If he only has to revive one Mindrette, his next turn comes pretty fast. If he has to revive all three, it comes relatively slowly. And yes, two gives an inbetween result.

YAUWE: After surviving the first Hellspawn, it got a lot easier, because Holy did far less damage.

I may need to take another look at his AI. He's certianly supposed to cast Hellspawn more times throughout the fight.

CORELOCK: The beginning was pretty easy and arms were pretty easy due to Judgement. With three Auto-Walls the remaining part wasn't that bad either... The Corelock fell apart on one of my turns. Does this mean I whittled down all its HP or did I just survive long enough? It seemed to last only very, very few rounds once its arms have been defeated.

You have to get rid of all its HP to destroy it. Surviving long enough doesn't outright kill it; it just disables its main attack (and instead, it uses the weak laser that it used as a counterattack during earlier phases). The catch is that if you wait this long, you don't get the 2500 AP.

LUNARIS: Argh! Again this possession! So I had to move Vince in to have him possessed, because he is the least dangerous. The rest was a rather long fight. Especially annoying was the combo of first reducing everyone to 1HP and then putting all the status buffs on. I always killed the possessed Vince in between and then had none to remove all these buffs... By far the hardest battle in the final dungeon.

I'm considering one small change - making him not use Zanmato (which is also the trigger for the dialogue and changing music) until a certain way through the fight. Probably not half way, but maybe something like 2/3rds or even 3/4s.

XEON: The first four incarnations were trivially done each with two Judgements. The next four needed slightly more, but never got close to actually hurting my party which was by now fully buffed up. This was actually a pretty disappointing fight.

I think the conclusion to be drawn here: Judgement is too powerful. I might get rid of its ability to ignore the Spirit stat, although this would likely need its power to be increased a bit (otherwise, it'd just be a clone of Disaster and Atomic Blast). However, given that the whole game is focused on "we gotta defeat Lunaris", I did want him to be the biggest challenge - Xeon is meant to be a bit easier.

EDIT: No, it seems Judgement is not quite identical to those two apart from ignoring Spirit. It's actually slightly more powerful than them - and in turn, Disaster is actually more powerful than Atomic Blast.

[namida]

Re-responses to boss feedback

YAUWE: After surviving the first Hellspawn, it got a lot easier, because Holy did far less damage.

I may need to take another look at his AI. He's certianly supposed to cast Hellspawn more times throughout the fight.

I took a look. Theoretically, he can cast it again. But he only even considers doing so every 6th turn, and at best (if no one is zombied) the chance is 50%. I've changed this to check every 3rd turn and with much better odds.

CORELOCK: The beginning was pretty easy and arms were pretty easy due to Judgement. With three Auto-Walls the remaining part wasn't that bad either... The Corelock fell apart on one of my turns. Does this mean I whittled down all its HP or did I just survive long enough? It seemed to last only very, very few rounds once its arms have been defeated.

You have to get rid of all its HP to destroy it. Surviving long enough doesn't outright kill it; it just disables its main attack (and instead, it uses the weak laser that it used as a counterattack during earlier phases). The catch is that if you wait this long, you don't get the 2500 AP.

I think nerfing Judgement will almost be enough here, but I'm going to slightly increase all parts' HP as well.

LUNARIS: Argh! Again this possession! So I had to move Vince in to have him possessed, because he is the least dangerous. The rest was a rather long fight. Especially annoying was the combo of first reducing everyone to 1HP and then putting all the status buffs on. I always killed the possessed Vince in between and then had none to remove all these buffs... By far the hardest battle in the final dungeon.

I'm considering one small change - making him not use Zanmato (which is also the trigger for the dialogue and changing music) until a certain way through the fight. Probably not half way, but maybe something like 2/3rds or even 3/4s.

I decided to go ahead with this change, but I think this fight is fine otherwise.

XEON: The first four incarnations were trivially done each with two Judgements. The next four needed slightly more, but never got close to actually hurting my party which was by now fully buffed up. This was actually a pretty disappointing fight.

I think the conclusion to be drawn here: Judgement is too powerful. I might get rid of its ability to ignore the Spirit stat, although this would likely need its power to be increased a bit (otherwise, it'd just be a clone of Disaster and Atomic Blast). However, given that the whole game is focused on "we gotta defeat Lunaris", I did want him to be the biggest challenge - Xeon is meant to be a bit easier.

EDIT: No, it seems Judgement is not quite identical to those two apart from ignoring Spirit. It's actually slightly more powerful than them - and in turn, Disaster is actually more powerful than Atomic Blast.

I've made a few minor tweaks to her stats, but I think mostly this fight should remain as-is. It shouldn't make a huge difference.

Re-feedback to bugs

I'm having some difficulty even finding the cause of, let alone fixing, the Lunaris / Xeon auto-state bug. I tried rewriting the code for auto-states in a way that shouldn't be vunerable to this... which did work, but introduced even more other bugs. I'll keep trying though, since this is pretty critical. I have noticed this bug doesn't seem to occur in battle test mode, only when I actually face them in game. But, there's nothing unusual about starting those battles compared to any other boss; the only boss that has anything even remotely unusual in relation to how the fight is started is Matalithe.

There is one thing that I can think of, but I don't *think* it should affect it. However, if anyone has a suitable save (specifically, prior to fighting Corrupted (test of power just before Aisha) and with Auto-Shield or another auto-ability obtained), can you see if this bug affects that battle too? Disregard that.

I have no idea why, but it seems it relates to the fact that the battles are all in a row, without any walking around time inbetween. I think this is the only case in the game where this can happen. But I have noticed that if I add a warp to bypass Corelock and go straight to one of the other battles, they're fine. (If I go to Lunaris, then continue on to Xeon, the bug still occurs in the Xeon battle.)

EDIT: Yes, confirmed beyond any doubt that it's related to the multiple-battles-in-one-event-sequence thing. I added a debug event that spawned four battles in a row against early-game enemies, and indeed, the bug arose in all except the first one. Still no idea why.

EDIT: Okay, found it! The bug is actually a bug in RMVXA's default engine code of all things; but one that would never arise under normal circumstances - the auto-state code being "abnormal" enough to trigger it.

[namida]

V024 update is here, mostly to address Nepster's bug reports / feedback.

Please note there are two different upgrade links - one for people with V021 or V022, and one for people with V023. If unsure, get the V021 / V022 one (it won't hurt to use this if you're on V023, it's just a slightly larger download). If you're on earlier than V021, you'll need to grab the fresh download - your saves will still work, of course.

If you've encountered the bug where, after fighting the final Monster Hunter boss (or the one directly outside the Mayae Ranges, but this will only happen with that fight under very specific circumstances that are unlikely to happen, whereas it can occur very easily with the final one), the battle music for random encounters is wrong, revisiting any part of the plains will fix this - in fact, it will even fix this on V023 (but V024 has some changes to avoid this bug happening in the first place, hopefully).

Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ql2k22kzh6v1wh/LoaO_V024_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5t10h4ogy3zqgyj/LoaO_V024_Upgrade_23.zip?dl=1 (from V023 only)
Upgrade: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0dp5b7xqx62vlyg/LoaO_V024_Upgrade_2122.zip?dl=1 (from V021 or V022 only)

Changelog (as usual, free of any significant spoilers but may have very minor ones)

-- New Content --
( None )

-- Changes --
Atomic Blast's description has been slightly altered (the effect is unchanged)
Made some minor changes to the last three bosses
MP Direct can no longer interact with Half/One MP Cost
Made a few minor modifications to the layout of the second half of the final dungeon
Judgement no longer ignores the enemy's Spirit stat
Immunize now protects against Virus in addition to the existing statuses it protected against

-- Fixed Bugs --
(May be others, as I don't always note every bug that I fix)
If multiple battles occur during a single event sequence, automatic statuses may not apply immediately in the 2nd and onwards
One warp in the final dungeon would require the player to press Enter to activate it after the first usage
An optional boss that is incomplete and should not yet be accessible, was
If MP Direct is equipped, all attacks that cost MP but not BP become free to cast
If MP Direct is equipped, Smokescreen and Crippling Strike can be used from the menu
Triumph does not heal Virus before trying to heal HP (it does heal Zombie correctly)
One boss opens the fight with Hellspawn then almost never uses it again, but is meant to use it fairly often
After fighting the final monster hunter boss, incorrect music may play in random encounters (revisit the plains to fix)

[Nepster]

I haven't tried the end-game again, but still some...

Re-re-feedback

XEON: The first four incarnations were trivially done each with two Judgements. The next four needed slightly more, but never got close to actually hurting my party which was by now fully buffed up. This was actually a pretty disappointing fight.

I think the conclusion to be drawn here: Judgement is too powerful. I might get rid of its ability to ignore the Spirit stat, although this would likely need its power to be increased a bit (otherwise, it'd just be a clone of Disaster and Atomic Blast). However, given that the whole game is focused on "we gotta defeat Lunaris", I did want him to be the biggest challenge - Xeon is meant to be a bit easier.

EDIT: No, it seems Judgement is not quite identical to those two apart from ignoring Spirit. It's actually slightly more powerful than them - and in turn, Disaster is actually more powerful than Atomic Blast.

I've made a few minor tweaks to her stats, but I think mostly this fight should remain as-is. It shouldn't make a huge difference.

While the Lunaris fight was very well-balanced and a nice challenge, I still worry about the Xeon fight: It never did more than 1500 damage to anyone in my party and all my characters had two actions between each of Xeon's actions. So lots of time to completely heal even with relying on Regen and not casting any healing spells. So nerfing Judgement just means that the fight takes a lot longer, unless Xeon has some nasty surprises waiting for me if I take longer to take him down.

At any rate, a big reason for this is because Zanmato is a physical attack, and Ivy's strength is MUCH lower than her magic. This is also why Trauma seems quite pathetic in her hands, especially in the early-game; it's also physical. Another very significant reason is that Judgement isn't affected by Spirit; whereas Zanmato is affected by Defence. Compare against a target with Weaken (Meltdown doesn't matter) for more accurate comparisons. (Now on the other hand, Zanmato in Alicia's hands...)

But one only has one Ultra-Damage, so one has to decide between Ivy's Judgement and Alicia's Zanmato (with the other character doing only 9999 damage).
Btw. I always thought Trauma and Zanmato would use the Magic stat to determine their power, but deal physical damage and are affected by the monster's Defence. Interesting that a magic spell uses Strength...

[Proxima]

A bug has come up that's interfering with the next episode of the LLG

Spoiler

I go to the water caves immediately after Alicia's flashback, before doing the mountain. Lena joins the party. I enter a battle with Lena, Alicia, Harley and Amanda, and don't switch characters at all. I finish the battle with only Lena alive. Tara somehow gains EXP for this...?

[namida]

Will look into it but will probably wait for the next major update to fix, unless more bugs arise that lead to a need for a bugfix update again.

@Nepster: It is completely possible, even in a save file that was started on the current version, to have two by this point. (In previous versions, three was possible.)

[Nepster]

I played the end bosses again...

Yauwe is now a much more challenging enemy. And nerfing Judgement was a good decision, too.

Lunaris: Is it intended that it only starts using Zanmato around 300.000HP? I thought the plan was to start the "enhanced" mode a lot earlier?

Xeon: Still an absolutely trivial fight. The attacks to the party barely do any damage, and Ivy's Ghost Breath deals 99.999 damage.

Glory: I now got the ability 1BP-Cost and equipped Ivy with Auto-Haste, 1BP-Cost and Ultra-Damage. This way she had to charge once at the very beginning, but then could use Glory on the whole party and an arbitrary number of Plagues, Atomic Bombs, ... essentially for free. This still feels over-powered.

Ultra-Damage: I know the one from the C&B V fight. But I have no clue at all where I could get the second one. Can you tell me?

[Proxima]

How to get the item Nepster asked about (BIG spoiler):

Spoiler

The cloaked merchant in Sysona sells Ultra Damage for 6.5 million. An NPC in Nyatta hints that some cloaked merchants lower their price if you have bought from other cloaked merchants. In this case...

Spoiler

...give 250,000 to the merchant in Taedwa (the one who takes your money and runs off laughing) and the Sysona merchant lowers his price to 100,000.

[namida]

Responses to Nepster

Yauwe is now a much more challenging enemy. And nerfing Judgement was a good decision, too.

Lunaris: Is it intended that it only starts using Zanmato around 300.000HP? I thought the plan was to start the "enhanced" mode a lot earlier?

Lunaris' AI basically cycles between 6 steps, with the caveat that he can add in physical attacks (which delay the next move rather than skipping it), and Sinful Guard will be skipped if there's no point in using it.
In the original version, Zanmato would occur either as the 6th step (regardless of HP), or if his HP is below half (this does interrupt the pattern, it's essentially an immediate jump to the 6th step).
The new version works differently - Zanmato has no "occur immediately" trigger. However, its use as the 6th step is skipped if he's above 2/3rds HP.
Either way, the above only applies for the *first* time he uses it - after that, it's used as the 6th step every cycle, no matter what.
Perhaps I should combine these - use it as the 6th step if below 2/3rds HP, and use it immediately (well, on the next turn) if he drops below half HP.

EDIT: No, upon a closer look, current code is that he should always use Zanmato on the first turn he gets after dropping below 2/3rds of his max HP. And I just tested it again to make sure it works correctly. I suspect you may have been dishing out damage so quickly, you got him down from 666,667 (or higher) to 300,000 without him getting a turn?

Xeon: Still an absolutely trivial fight. The attacks to the party barely do any damage, and Ivy's Ghost Breath deals 99.999 damage.

Hm. I might need to make more significant revisions to this battle then. But I also don't want it to be overly hard - I'm not too worried whether Corelock or Xeon is harder, but I do want Lunaris to be the hardest of the three.
Ghost Breath is a very weird attack in terms of how it works. In fact, one of it's most unusual quirks is that Spirit is applied to the damage twice. Seems this isn't enough though for an enemy as powerful as Xeon. I do want it to retain this "amazing damage vs powerful enemies" effect, but being able to do a guaranteed 99999 against any sufficiently powerful enemy is too much. As such, I think the ideal modification here: Make Ghost Breath unable to exceed 9999, even with Ultra Damage equipped. (There is precedent for this to some extent - we have Full-Cure which can exceed 9999 even without Ultra Damage, and most (if not all) items can't exceed even with Ultra Damage. But Ghost Breath is a weird enough attack in general that I wouldn't feel awkward even if it was the only attack in the game with such a trait.)

I might take a more sigificant look at rebalancing the game as a whole once I've finished making all remaining content. Until then, I'm not going to worry too much about these issues - I'll fix bugs, but I think it's more important to get the remaining content finished first before worrying further about the odd case where a battle isn't balanced perfectly, so I can look at the entire picture.

[namida]

Continuing from the last post

I might actually make some minor tweaks to Xeon right away. Nothing too huge, but I might add (most likely for the Light / Dark forms and all later ones, except maybe the final one) the ability for her to use Dispel as a counterattack - including on characters other than the one who attacked her.

The final form is where she becomes really dangerous. I'm guessing you didn't encounter this due to beating her too quickly, but on her 3rd, 6th, etc turns she uses Judgement - and it packs a major wallop when she uses it (around 40,000 damage each to a party with no extra defences against it in place).

I also agree, the more I think about it, that One BP Cost is still too overpowered, so I've changed it to Quarter BP Cost. This cannot be stacked with Half BP Cost; if you equip both, you just get the effect of Quarter BP Cost. Since this contradicts the player's expectation (given that, for example, you can stack HP+100% with HP+25%), I've explicitly pointed this out in Quarter BP Cost's explanation text. This is primarily a problem for Plague and Glory (and maybe to a lesser extent, Solidity and Triumph); I don't see it as much of an issue with Atomic Blast as you can achieve the same effect - slightly stronger, even - with One MP Cost + Disaster. (True, there is the difference that Disaster is reflectable whereas Atomic Blast isn't, but very few enemies actually use Reflect.)

[Proxima]

A couple of bugs relating to the portion of the game I'm currently on in my LLG videos:

Spoiler

Wraith: The game crashes if Harley is possessed and there are two characters with positive statuses for him to Dispel.

Matalithe: After switching to group 4, the choices offered are 1, 2 and 4 instead of 3.

[namida]

I could've sworn I'd fixed the first one. Maybe I made a hotfix for it but forgot to apply the fix to the main working copy or something... (It's bloody annoying that RPG Maker VX Ace stores all the scripts in a proprietary-format file and thus it can't effectively be used with Git or similar, to avoid this kind of issue. RPG Maker MV fixes this issue, though moving to it from VXA is not possible without rewriting all the custom code - and it still has nearly all the downsides of VXA, which is why I'm very strongly leaning towards a custom engine if I ever do a remake.)

Will look into the second tomorrow.

[Proxima]

Two more bugs, one of which is progress-blocking:

Spoiler

When you have the balloon, save over a city and load that save. The balloon sprite is replaced with Tara (although she can still move like the balloon!)

The Lab Key is consumed after one use, making it impossible to fight all the Specimens. (By the way, I saved before realising this bug, so I hope you can find a way to fix it that lets me get the key back so I can continue.)

[Proxima]

Also, this may or may not be a bug. Poison reduced the Dinosore to 0 HP and it didn't die. (Which was really lucky, because I wanted to knock out my other party members to avoid EXP.) I know poison damage can immediately kill, so is this just what happens when it goes down to exactly 0 HP?

[namida]

Enemies that have a final attack, or anything else that happens (beyond just dying) when they're reduced to 0 HP - even if it's solely behind the scenes stuff - sometimes will not die if they're reduced to 0 HP by Poison (or Zombie-Regen) or a move that cannot be counterattacked (for example, because the move itself is a counterattack). Not all such enemies are affected by this, but if a specific enemy is, it will always be. I still need to look into fixing this. I don't recall Dinosore being such a case off the top of my head though, so I might need to take a closer look at it specifically too.

[Nepster]

Some more small bugs

1) In the rolling ball maze (parallel to the calculator puzzle), if one manages to put two balls on the same place, the game does not handle it correctly after rolling away and reaching the next terrain: One rolls on without any ball below the feet.
2) In the Ben fight, it says either "Tara's party was defeated" or "Tara was victorious!". Both times it should be Alicia.
3) When Cameron talks to the party after the Fragment fight, he uses the word "nesecerially".
4) Alicia's Poison Shurikan does never poison the Cult Warriors ouside destroyed Saria. I know, you already checked this once, but I really cannot get Alicia to poison anyone.
5) Not really a bug, but anyway: When Yuki and Sasha appear in the Ice Temple and Alicia turns away, she tramples on some bones of a dead Guardian. While this would be fitting for her a while ago, it doesn't make sense now.

[namida]

Proxima's reports

Matalithe: After switching to group 4, the choices offered are 1, 2 and 4 instead of 3.

This is a purely text error; the option that should say "Group 3" still functions correctly (ie: switches you to group 3). Fixed, anyway.

Wraith: The game crashes if Harley is possessed and there are two characters with positive statuses for him to Dispel.

I don't see any obvious cause for this in the code, so will need to investigate it more closely.

When you have the balloon, save over a city and load that save. The balloon sprite is replaced with Tara (although she can still move like the balloon!)

As this is a purely-graphical error, I'll treat this as low priority, so I probably won't fix it in the next update.

The Lab Key is consumed after one use, making it impossible to fight all the Specimens. (By the way, I saved before realising this bug, so I hope you can find a way to fix it that lets me get the key back so I can continue.)

As mentioned in chat, this one has been fixed for the next update.

Also, this may or may not be a bug. Poison reduced the Dinosore to 0 HP and it didn't die. (Which was really lucky, because I wanted to knock out my other party members to avoid EXP.) I know poison damage can immediately kill, so is this just what happens when it goes down to exactly 0 HP?

Applied some code that should fix this, though still need to test it.

Have made notes of all the untested ones here, as well as Nepster's reports.

[namida]

V025 update is here! This fixes quite a few bugs and has a few rebalancing changes. But most notably, a significant portion (though not yet all) of the sidequest in that strange building near Saria is now accessible. Do note that you need to be progressed pretty far through the storyline before you can start this sidequest, and that it is intended as a postgame sidequest.

Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zm70tqg5f5z9g77/LoaO_V025_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade (from V023 or higher only): https://www.dropbox.com/s/aff4uaxtd58g4yu/LoaO_V025_Upgrade.zip?dl=1

If you are on a version older than V023, please get the fresh download. You can still keep using your save files.

[Nepster]

I played the final three bosses again.

As per Proxima's request here my final party and strategy

Corelock:
Alicia: HP+100%, Luck+25%, Auto-Wall, Ultra Damage, Double Hit, Use Special
Ivy: HP+100%, Multiproof, Ultra Damage, Half MP Cost, Quarter BP Cost, Use Black Magic
Harley: HP+100%, Multiproof, Auto-Wall, Auto-Haste, Booster, Use Blue Magic
Amanda: HP+100%, Mag+25%, Agi+25%, Auto-Wall, Damage Resist, One MP Cost

Ivy main task was charging and using Glory on the party. On her free turns she used Judgement. Harley got secondary helping tasks, while Amanda with Disaster and Alicia with physical attacs did damange.

Lunaris:
Alicia: now Auto-Wall replaced by Dispelstrike
Ivy and Amanda: same as above
Vince: HP+100%, Auto-Shield, Multi Resist, Omnidrain

Vince got the task to be posessed all the time, Amanda to heal him with Firia. Alicia did the main damage after using Shattering Bombs to inflict Weaken&Meltdown, while Ivy used Glory, Crippling Strike and later on Judgement.

Xeon:
Same party as for Lunaris, but I switched Harley for Vince on the first turn.

Again everyone got buffed up. Instead of the now nerfed Ghost Breath, I now used G-Force to do 99.999 damage per turn. This reduced the number of counter-attacks to a minimum. I never got to see the promised Judgement from Xeon...
While the Dispel attacks made it slightly more interesting, it was still very easy and repetitive fight.

And finally one more bug from the LLG. See attachment.

[Nepster]

Regarding the new sidequest

I don't see the reason why this sidequest should only be vailable at the very end? Yes, the items given upon completing scans are very nice, but most of them should only be available late in the game anyway due to missing monsters. And having the sidequest early (or even only having the ability to superscan) would be nice, because then one wouldn't need to run around a lot with a totally overlevelled party and fight trivial monters, but could superscan them when one first comes into the corresponding area.

Regarding finding some of the monsters:
For some of the rare monsters I used your game source-code to look up where I can find them, because I never encountered them before. These are:
- Impendeor and Wangbang: They only occur in some caves where one doesn't spend a lot of time, and there only as a rare ecounter. I suggest making them the main encounters in the Wraith cave.
- Tiellia: I encountered this once in the LLG, so I knew where to look. But it still took me 20-30 random fights to get it - and I am only talking about fights after having all the other monsters scanned in this area.
- Creskent: I never encountered this monster while playing regularly. I only guessed where I coud find it, because I couldn't find it in the long grass of the plains anywhere.
- Cult Droid: This only occurs (as a rare encounter) in an area where one normally doesn't stay for long, so doesn't fight any fights. I would never ever have found this, if I hadn't looked it up.
- Clatter and Accursed: I never fought them in regular game-play. But at least one gets the idea fast, that there might be new monsters found in the Metaspe region of the Cult Base...
- Cuboid: I only once got it in the LLG and it took me a very long time to find it again.
- Treevil: Rather rare encounter.
- Cackter: I learned about the Cackter from Proxima. Otherwise I would have no idea at all, where to find it.
If you want to keep them as such rare encounters, please at least add NPC hinting at their location, similar to the Toxic Head.

Finally there are some monsters, that I believed cannot be found at the final stage of the game at all:
- Cutster: This seems to be a monster that occurs only in the very first maps, that can no longer be reached.
- Blade, Venocondaur, Icy Blob: I believe they only occur in the invisible maze in the Metaspe and in destroyed Saria. Neither area can be reached at the end.

And regarding some monsters from this sidequest

INTOXICATOR:
The Erase ability was a very nasty surprise. Fortunately Crippling Strike and Plague worked wonders and made the monsters far less threatening. Again Sludge was a very nasty attack, but fortunately I had a fully buffed up Harley still in the party to remove the debuffs. Darkness wasn't much of a problem, because my damage dealer was Ivy with Judgement.

SUMMONER:
Nice improvement over the Specimens. Slowing it and its tendency to use only about half of its turn to summon other creatures (even when no other is present at the moment) helpes defeating it. One has to be slightly lucky with the summons though. Malcantores are still a major headache even with Judgement, but Zoloms and Steelworks can be defeated very fast now.

MOLLEGART:
Very nasty piece of work. Three party members got Auto-Haste and Auto-Wall and I equipped my now three Ultra-Damages. Alicia got Dispelstrike, too. With this I was able to revive my party members constantly and get some attacks in between. One attack per Mollegart action was pretty much enough, because with Weaken and Meltdown, Disaster, Judgement and Alicia's Double cut all did about 50.000 damage.

ELPHINU:
It was a huge chore to get Weaken and Meltdown on it, especially as I missed the Shockwave item. The Haste together with a MP draining one-shotting attack was very nasty. After getting a few debuffs on, I did at least decent damage...

PS: None of them have steals. And I only got a drop from the Intoxicator. If the others have drops as well, perhaps make it certain that one gets them. There is no incentive to fight them a second time and for grinding purposes they are too hard anyway.

[namida]

Regarding sidequest boss drops

All of them have a drop except Swarm Roach (who instead gives massive EXP and AP), always with a 50% chance of dropping it. I might look into changing this so that they have a 100% chance the first time you defeat them, which drops to 50% on all subsequent battles.

Regarding monster availability

Cutster has been added to the cave on the Caralint-Nyatta road. Every random encounter from the Nyatta-Saria metaspe should occur in the new junction room. If all else fails, talk to the girl outside the arena after beginning the sidequest.

EDIT: Confirmed that all the monsters you listed are possible to encounter in areas accessible during the endgame period.

My initial thought here was that most monsters would be available as soon as the boat is, but with some more thought, this isn't actually true. The Nyatta Island and Western Islands would be doable upon, or soon after, getting the boat - this in turn is enough to also unlock the first Original Creation (as the unlock condition is "unlock two area creations"). Saria Island cannot be completed until the Cult Base is accessible, Eastern Islands cannot be completed until Sysona is accessible. Trinity Palace is an obvious one; the only monster from it that can be encountered before accessing it is Flare Roach (very rarely appears in the Cult Base, and appears fairly often in the Haldwa cave), and they still can't be encountered until after completing the Cult Factory as that's when those two areas become available. Of course, it's probably best that that girl outside the arena doesn't offer her services until the Trinity Palace is accessible; maybe not even until all storyline bosses (excluding Corelock onwards, for obvious reasons) has been defeated.

Final bosses

Again everyone got buffed up. Instead of the now nerfed Ghost Breath, I now used G-Force to do 99.999 damage per turn. This reduced the number of counter-attacks to a minimum. I never got to see the promised Judgement from Xeon...

She should not be vunerable to G-Force. Actually, I noticed I overlooked giving Lunaris this immunity and thus fixed it in the latest update, but of course, I didn't check that Xeon wasn't missing it too...

[namida]

All but one of the remaining bosses for the sidequest are now completed. That aside, there are also two other optional bosses left to finish implementing.

[namida]

So, due to some issues on my computer, my working folder for this was erased.

Of course, I have backups, but the backups were slightly out of date. Basically, I'm back to the state the game was in at the last release (possibly with one or two minor changes). At least there wasn't much in the way of bugfixes (only a certain boss being vunerable to proportional-damage attacks when they shouldn't be). I do have one last resort method for trying to recover the data, but it isn't the most likely to work. (EDIT: Located the raw binary data of at least the relevant AI scripts; still trying to locate the actual enemy data. Whether or not I can integrate it back into the main files is another matter.)

(EDIT 2: I've managed to also locate the data relating to the skills and enemy formations of the extra enemies, but so far I haven't been able to locate actual enemy data that includes the last three - I have found data that includes the first three that were added since the last update. Once again though, this still doesn't mean for sure that I can integrate the data usefully.)

(EDIT 3: Alright! I've located raw data that includes all the enemies now! But actually trying to make use of this data will have to wait until tomorrow, I'm too tired at the moment.)

On a side note, I have been looking into various things that could become relevant to any potential remake, and there may be some potential for that remake to become much more impressive than I would've initially expected - as well as a mobile version (although this would likely be limited to Android, as I don't have an iOS device I could use to test on). Perhaps even console if by some stroke of luck it becomes really popular - the engine I'm looking at definitely supports that, though getting approved for it is another matter.

[namida]

Restoring the AI data was a success! Which means it's very likely I'll be able to restore the other data too.

EDIT: YES!!!! All lost data restored!

[namida]

Only one optional boss (albeit one consisting of two enemies) remains to be implemented now. Been a bit busy lately so haven't worked on it as much as I would've liked, but this one is purely a matter of implementing it (and some testing), as the design is all decided already.

I was considering doing another major rebalance update after everything else is finished, but I'll probably leave this in favor of putting more effort towards a higher-quality remake (but may still make a few minor rebalancing tweaks, if need be).

[Nepster]

Any progress during the last month?

[Proxima]

Mea culpa. Namida has implemented the boss I designed, but I haven't gotten round to testing it yet.

[namida]

I'm preparing a "pre-final" release right now. This basically includes all the content, but likely still has a few minor bugs or balancing issues. I can then incorporate Proxima's feedback, as well as anything else, into the true final release.

[namida]

Said release is now ready!

As mentioned, while this now includes all content that I ever intend to have in the game, there may still be one or two more updates solely to fix bugs and maybe make some balancing tweaks.

Download links:
Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yu5bgfg0tosmrf/LoaO_V026_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade from Demo V023 or higher: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ky0rhudpy0xezg/LoaO_V026_Upgrade.zip?dl=1

[namida]

Found a significant bug in one enemy's AI. I can 99% guarantee that none of you have fought the enemy in question yet (as it requires defeating every other boss, optional or not, in the game, except the final boss sequence), so you won't have to re-fight anything to get the "proper" fight. Just redownload before playing further. (If you used the fresh download before, you can just use the upgrade version to re-download.)

[namida]

Uploaded V026a (download links remain the same; look for a "V026a.txt" file in the ZIP to confirm you've got the fixed version).

This fixes a bug that causes the game to crash at the start of two specific boss battles - one of which is among the final bosses sequence.

[namida]

Since there are no further issues reported, I'm going to declare this finished now. Further bugfixes are possible if needed, but no further new content or balance changes will occur.

[namida]

V026b released. This just has a few bugfixes. One in particular was a bug that prevented further progress; if you have a bugged save, it will be automatically fixed when loaded on this version. That aside, there was one case of a boss having the wrong immunities, and one exploitable glitch (though with a relatively small window of opportunity to exploit it), as well as a couple of purely cosmetic issues.

Download links remain the same, check for "V026b.txt" if you want to make sure you've got the new update.

Fresh download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yu5bgfg0tosmrf/LoaO_V026_Fresh.zip?dl=1
Upgrade (from V023 or higher only): https://www.dropbox.com/s/9ky0rhudpy0xezg/LoaO_V026_Upgrade.zip?dl=1
Steam Workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1252703211

[namida]

One site I was trying to submit this to was quite fussy about the quality of preview images, so I got some better and up-to-date ones. Added to first post.

[namida]

So, I've mentioned the idea in several places, and I think that - at least on the smaller communities like this one (I might hold off from announcing anything on larger ones for now) - I'm at a point where I can safely announce this now.

I'm officially working on a full-blown remake of this game!

It's going to be a very large project, it probably won't be finished for a long time. I had initially planned to use RPG Maker MV, but before I'd even so much as done the first few database entries I quickly realised it was going to be the major problems with VXAce all over again, specifically, that while it's far from impossible, the RPG Maker engines simply aren't very well suited to anything that deviates much from the default system.

So, instead, I'm making my own engine entirely from scratch. I'm developing it in Lazarus (which is pretty much just "Open-Source Delphi"; you'll probably recognize Delphi as what was used to make Lemmix and NeoLemmix). Likewise, all the graphical / music / etc assets will need to be custom made as well. My plan here is to just do low-quality, almost-placeholder-type ones while I'm working on it, and if / when I get to the stage that completion is inevitable, I'll look at replacing them with better ones - I might make them myself, or I might look at finding someone else to contribute, though either way it'll be original resources made specifically for this game. So far, I haven't written a single line of the actual engine yet, but the editor is coming along very nicely - database editing is almost complete (just missing AI scripts, common events, and some parts of enemy formations). Why did I decide to move to Lazarus now - quite simply, because it can produce cross-platform apps. I'm hoping for the finished product to be available on at least Windows, Mac, Linux and Android; possibly iOS too, but I'd have to get myself an iOS device for testing first.

To be clear - this isn't going to be "more or less the same game, just looks better" type remake like eg. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (nothing against N Sane Trilogy of course, it's amazing, it's just not an example of the type of remake I'm going for here). It's more a case of "a new game, but using the original game as if it were a rough draft". In particular, I want to greatly improve the storywriting standard, as well as integrate elements that I had in mind but ultimately didn't make it into the game (eg. the planned sidequest in Sysona that was blocked off by a "not yet available" message in early demos, but ultimately got culled altogether and the path that would have lead to it is no longer there in the final version). I also have several changes in mind for the levelling system - most notably, rather than EXP increasing your level which then determines your stats, EXP would just accumulate and the player could then spend it on directly upgrading stats. (I realise this could get tedious, so I plan to add some kind of option to let the game manage it automatically too. However, for those players who really want fine-grained control, the option would be there.)

As far as gameplay mechanics go, I'm pretty happy with the ideas I have in mind. However, writing is a much weaker point for me, so I'd be very interested to hear suggestions. I don't want to spoil the ideas I have in mind, which in turn means it might be harder to take suggestions as they'd have to be based off the original version rather than any revisions I have in mind (which there are a lot, since this is going from "create some excuse for a story to give the gameplay some context" to "actually try and have a good story"), but I'd still be glad to hear them - general ideas rather than specific points could still be pretty useful. (eg. "In this specific scene, Tara looks to the left, she should look to the right instead" isn't really useful because that scene might not even end up in the remake, or might look very different. "I feel there should have been more on Ivy's backstory" on the other hand would be a useful suggestion. Of course, feel free to be more specific, it's just a bit uncertain how useful it'd be.)

[nin10doadict]

Interesting. Don't know if I could offer any story input though; I didn't get very far. I got terrified that I might spend time earning AP for a character only to have them disappear forever later. Also got scared off from the looming threat of "this game is hard now and will only get harder."

[ccexplore]

Are there really no game engines out there that's not RPG-specific, but still generic enough to support making a few different genres of games of which RPGs can be one?  I have nothing against writing your own engine from scratch, but I have to wonder if there's already something between that and RPG Maker which you can use instead, so less time needs to be spent on the low-level nitty-gritty, but still provide enough flexibility to do the things you can't do in RPG Maker.

[namida]

Are there really no game engines out there that's not RPG-specific, but still generic enough to support making a few different genres of games of which RPGs can be one?  I have nothing against writing your own engine from scratch, but I have to wonder if there's already something between that and RPG Maker which you can use instead, so less time needs to be spent on the low-level nitty-gritty, but still provide enough flexibility to do the things you can't do in RPG Maker.

I did look at a few, but ultimately found that most of them were frustrating me trying to work with /their/ ideas of how things should be done. In general, I usually do find it easier to work with my own code than anyone else's.

Interesting. Don't know if I could offer any story input though; I didn't get very far. I got terrified that I might spend time earning AP for a character only to have them disappear forever later. Also got scared off from the looming threat of "this game is hard now and will only get harder."

Any character who you ever permanently lose is not possible to gain AP for in the first place. That's one of the few ways I was nice to the player. (It doesn't really spoil anything, because it's made quite clear when such characters join that they're temporary.)

[namida]

Remake menu system coming along nicely. Face graphic is obviously placeholder.

Note the HP and MP gauges. The ones in the original version of the game only show the character's current HP relative to their maximum HP (and likewise for MP). This can often be misleading - if you have one character with 400 HP out of 1200, and another with 200 HP out of 400, who needs healing more urgently? Obviously the latter character - however, looking at the gauges can mislead, as the former's gauge would only be at 33%, while the latter's would be at 50%.

Instead, I've decided to make them consistent. So - green shows the character's current HP (or MP). Red shows the difference between their current and maximum. The black section is the difference between their max HP and the HP cap (ie: 9999 - I'm doing away with Ultra HP; or in the case of MP, it's 999). This way, the same amount of green bar means the same amount of HP, regardless of who has higher max HP.

While on the subject of stat caps - the original version capped stats (except HP and MP) at 255. This seems a bit weird; it's not due to any technical limitation in the engine, but rather is arbitrary, albeit based on that Final Fantasy also caps stats at this point. Instead, I'm going with a more logical cap of 99 this time around. Similar to in the original game, enemies will not be affected by the HP cap, but will still be affected by all other caps - although with that being said, rather than giving enemies outrageous amounts of HP, I'm intending to reduce the availability of overpowered attacks that lead to such high HP enemies. I don't envision many enemies having more than maybe 100k or so HP. (By comparison to the original - one of the final bosses has 1,000,000 HP, and some sidequest bosses have more than triple this.) Instead, you're not going to be having access to attacks that deal nearly that much damage in a single hit.

[namida]

The main screen of the menu is now complete, at least in terms of functionality (obviously some graphics still need to be added).

What's "Primary Class" and "Unleash Skill", you may be wondering?

In the original, each character had an inherent class, that they could use moves from without any special equipment. Then, equipment was available to allow them to equip extra classes. I've decided to greatly overhaul this system. Instead, each character now has a primary class, and up to two secondary classes. The character can use abilities from any equipped class. It's possible to unequip classes again, but the character must always have a primary class (I have actually already implemented this, but I haven't added support to the editor for actually setting their initial one yet, which is why the screenshot shows them all as empty). Thus, until you get to the point in the game where you get second copies of classes, you can't actually change them around - once you do, you can by all means remove the character's original class altogether and give them a different one - just keep in mind this won't significantly change their stats, so certain characters may not always be best suited to certain classes.

As for Unleash Skill, that's just the game's name for limit break type skills. I'm going to add, or in some cases repurpose particularly powerful moves from the original (think like Glory, Mix, etc), as limit break type skills. Similar to classes, you can equip and unequip these; you're not required to have one equipped, though characters don't have any inherent one to fall back on if you don't equip one. The Unleash Skill must match the character's primary class.

Aside from the unleash skill, regular skills will also be equipped and uneqipped, but a skill can only be equipped if the character has the matching class (it doesn't necesserially have to be their primary class).

At this point, beyond the Unleash Skill, I haven't implemented any ways the secondary classes are disadvantaged or lesser in effect compared to the main one. I'm still thinking about how, or even if, I want to do that.

That aside, yes, I've also added armor now. Note that most armor types are used by several characters rather than just one, so they're more interchangeable between characters than weapons are. Rather than equipping abilities directly like in the original version, I plan to go more FFX-like here and have the abilities be linked to weapons / armor. I'm undecided on whether the player will be able to customize the abilities on equipment, or if it'll be a matter of having to find equipment with the abilities you want.

[namida]

In the original version of the game, once you got to the point where most enemies gave more than 1 or 2 AP per fight, you could very quickly amass a huge number of abilities to have ready to use at any time.

I want to somewhat nerf that (not to mention the lack of direct levelling), and as such, I'm introducing the "Gem Gear" system. The above image shows the gem gear, to which you can equip gems which unlock various abilities. You can remove them, but you can only use abilities that come from currently-equipped gems.

As you can see, the gem gear provides 12 gem slots. This will be constant throughout the game. However, the slots are not all interchangeable.

There are three types of gems - Class, Unleash and Standard.

Class gems don't do much in and of themself. They might provide some minor passive benefits, such as slightly boosting some stats. The gem slot with the two green stars around it is the primary class slot; this is the only slot which must be filled at all times. The slots immediately to the left and right of it are the secondary class slots; these do not have to be filled.

Unleash gems provide a "limit break" type attack. An unleash gem will always have a corresponding class gem; you must have that class equipped as your primary class in order to equip the unleash gem. The slot right at the top is for an unleash gem. You don't have to have one equipped, but you can only equip one at a time. To be clear - there may be multiple unleash gems that correspond to the same class gem; but any given unleash gem will only have one class gem that it matches up with.

Standard gems might provide either a skill you can use in battle, or some kind of passive boost, or in some cases, both. Like Unleash gems, standard gems can correspond to a specific class gem; however, unlike unleash gems, there are also "neutral" standard gems that don't correspond to any particular class.

All remaining slots (besides the class slots and unleash slot) are for standard gems. Additionally, the two secondary class slots can also hold standard gems, if they aren't being used to hold class gems. There are some further limitations here: The four slots at the bottom can only hold neutral gems, or gems that correspond to the primary class. The two slots on each side (as well as the secondary class slots, if being used for standard gems) can hold gems that correspond to the primary class, or the secondary class on the same side. For example - if you equipped Fighter as the primary class, Theif as the left-side secondary class, and Black Mage as the right-side secondary class, the two standard slots on the left could hold Fighter-class gems, Theif-class gems, or neutral gems; but not Black Mage-class gems - those would have to go in the slots on the right. And you wouldn't be able to equip White Mage-class gems at all.

I envision most gems will provide some drawback to equipping them - as well as possible side benefits. Some neutral ones might be purely beneficial, but in this case, the downside would be taking up a slot that could otherwise allow you to equip an ability. But as an example, a standard gem that provides a fire spell, might also give the user a weakness to the ice element; or a standard gem that provides a strong physical attack might reduce the character's Defence and/or Magic stats. In this sense, it becomes not just a balancing game of deciding which skills within a limited range will be well suited for an upcoming battle, but also in terms of making sure you don't open too many weaknesses via the downsides of various gems.

I am wondering whether allowing the side slots to be used for the primary class might be overpowered, and I am considering making them for the secondary classes (or neutrals) only.

The gems themself would be found in all the standard ways to find items - drops / steals, purchasing, finding in chests, etc. Characters would also come with at least a primary class already equipped; and usually a couple more too (although in the case of Tara and Leanna, most likely they'll start with none beyond the primary class, but with them finding some very early in the first dungeon, as an opportunity to introduce and explain the system in-game).

(This is probably a bit of a confusing explanation, so feel free to ask if anything is unclear. Likewise, input is always appreciated, it's nowhere near too late to change any of this.)

[Nepster]

Nice to see such progress on your project!

One comment regarding the new main menu: I like the proportional HP/MP display over the characters, however at the beginning the bars will all be extremely small. How about setting the full bar to the maximum HP/MP among the characters, instead of the max possible HP/MP?

And I am not fully convinced of the gem system. It looks rather overly complicated. Whether this is worth in terms of new tactics, has to be seen however.

[namida]

One comment regarding the new main menu: I like the proportional HP/MP display over the characters, however at the beginning the bars will all be extremely small. How about setting the full bar to the maximum HP/MP among the characters, instead of the max possible HP/MP?

That's actually quite a good idea, thanks!

[namida]

I implemented Nepster's suggestion regarding the HP and MP gauges. The menu background looks different because I was also testing out code to allow for different window styles.

[namida]

Regarding the gem system, it can essentially be broken down to:

1. The character must always have a primary class equipped.
2. The character may equip one unleash skill (basically, limit break), which must be of their primary class.
3. The character may equip up to two different secondary classes, at a cost of one skill slot (see next point).
4. The character may equip up to ten skills, which may be either active (eg. Dark Attack) or passive (eg. HP+10%), subject to three conditions:
--- Any skills equipped must correspond to one of the character's equipped classes, except in the case of neutral skills (eg. HP+10% would be considered neutral, and could be equipped regardless of classes)
--- For each secondary class, only two skills that correspond to it may be equipped.
--- Two copies of the same skill may not simultaneously be equipped.

Beyond that, the only other thing of note is that some gems with one clear primary purpose (such as "let this character use the Fire spell") may also have minor passive side effects - for example, the Fire spell gem might also give the character a slight weakness to Ice and/or a slight resistance to Fire. These side effects would be made clearly visible when viewing the gem's information in game, they are not secret or unknown. This can also allow for giving drawbacks to even having certain skills available, for example, a powerful attack - perhaps the Disaster spell - might have a side effect of that the character's max HP is reduced by 10% when it's equipped. And whereas if skills had similar side effects in the original, you'd either have to choose "go without Disaster" or "have this character lose 10% of their max HP permanently", due to this system if you came across an enemy you really needed that extra HP for, you can simply unequip Disaster for that fight.


I have got an alternative idea I've been thinking about though - not a huge change from the initial one, but significant nonetheless.
1. The character must always have a primary class equipped.
2. The character may equip one unleash skill (basically, limit break), which must be of their primary class.
3. The character may equip up to four skills (active or passive) that correspond to their primary class (or are neutral).
4. The character may equip up to two secondary classes.
5. For each secondary class, the character may equip up to two abilities that correspond to either it, their primary class, or are neutral.

The key differences here are that the secondary class slots cannot be reused as skill slots for characters with only one or two classes, and that the extra slots also function as an unlock bonus when you get far enough to have secondary classes available. Under such a system, there could also be a "neutral class" gem, which essentially does nothing and doesn't allow equipping any new types of skills, but does make the extra slots available (for use of primary class or neutral skills). Thus, initially, the player would have only four skill slots available, but as they progress could get six, and then eight - and around the same time, also become able to equip characters with each others' skills to some extent, while still somewhat enforcing a lean towards the character's primary class (of course, you could change that - although, there isn't really any reason why I couldn't make that one permanent, now that I think about it).

Either way - the gem gear is just a fancy way of displaying it. And the more I think about that, the more I think the fancy display is a bad idea and I should probably scratch that image (but keep the underlying system).

[namida]

WIP status screen. At the moment only some basic info is shown - I plan to expand this to show (with details) current equipment, available skills, etc, using the currently unused space.

Note the much simpler gem display, rather than that confusing gem gear stuff. Only the classes (and unleash skill) get the name display, the rest just show the color of the gem (which will generally correspond to what class it is).

Rather than having to pre-create all the different variations, the different colorations (and presence or absence of the star, which signifies an unleash skill gem) are generated on-the-fly at render time. Thanks to GPU rendering, this has virtually no performance impact over having them pre-rendered.

The way coloring works (from a user point of view I mean; internally, there's nothing enforcing this) is:
- A class gem will have a white base, and a colored top - eg, the Fighter class gem in this image.
- An unleash skill gem will (base and top) be colored like the class it corresponds to, and have the star - eg, the Swiftslice gem in this image.
- A regular skill gem will (base and top) be colored like the class it corresponds to, but not have the star - no example of this in the above image, but it'd be exactly like the Swiftslice one minus the star.
- A neutral skill gem will be completely white - eg, the unnamed white gem in this image (which if you're curious, is one that boosts HP by 5%, which is also why her HP differs in this shot compared to earlier ones).

That aside, all gauges on the status screen show the stat relative to the stat cap (9999 for HP, 999 for MP, 99 for everything else), rather than relative to the highest in the party. Since the status screen only shows one character at a time, I felt it unnessecary to adjust for highest-in-party here (whereas I felt it made a lot of sense for the main menu screen, or for that matter, for the battle screen).

Despite the lack of the gem gear graphic, the underlying rules still more or less apply. The unleash skill slot, and the four slots under the primary class gem, can only contain a skill that corresponds to the primary class (or is neutral). The two slots under each secondary class slot, can contain a skill that corresponds to that secondary class (but not the other one), the primary class, or are neutral - but they can only be used if the respective secondary class slot has something in it (which must be a class gem of some kind; I will probably add a "neutral" class gem which fills one of these slots simply for the purpose of allowing more primary class (or neutral) gems to be equipped). You cannot equip two of the same gem. You can equip two gems that have the same effect (for example, if both the Fire and Ice skill gem had a side effect of boosting your Magic stat by 5%, you could still equip both of them as they're two different gems), but each specific effect will only be received once (so using the same example, your Magic stat would only increase by 5%, not by 10% or 11.025%). Different but similar effects can still stack - so you could get the combined effect of a gem that gives HP+5% and one that gives HP+10%; just not two that both give HP+5%. (I suspect most cases where gems give identical effects will be variants of each other anyway, such as this example of Fire and Ice).

The whole idea behind these tighter restrictions is that you can no longer head into battle with every skill you've obtained at your disposal - you must think about which ones you want to have for the battle (or area, when preparing for regular encounters) in question. Equipment will remain possible to change in-battle, but gems will only be possible to change outside of battle. With that being said, I plan to make the effects of equipment much less significant; major boosts will come from gems, which mean that in order to gain their benefits, you must sacrifice a skill in its place. And given the lack of any levelling system outside the effects that gems and equipment (and on a temporary basis, status effects) can give you, this can result in some tough decisions - for example, you're preparing Harley for a boss fight; you've decided you absolutely *need* a curative spell, a status heal spell and a revive spell. What's more important for that last slot (we'll just assume he only has access to the four main ones at this point) - boosting his HP by 20%, or also giving him the Haste spell?



EDIT: I have since added displays for current equipment - it shows not only the name of the equipment, but also the traits of it - as well a list of skills, and a list of passive abilities (whether they come from equipment or from gems, or potentially, are inherent to the character - not sure if characters will use the inherent passive abilities feature, it's more intended for enemies, but characters have support for it too just in case).

There's room for up to 10 skills (probably more than a character will ever actually have, given only 9 slots that can actually equip a skill - but there isn't anything that rules out one gem granting more than one skill), and up to 23 passive abilities, to be displayed. Each piece of equipment can have up to four effects, and as the presence of "(empty slot)" under them suggests, I'm at least considering making it possible to some extent to customize the equipment.

Also notice how the weapon effect is described as "Physical Damage+5%". This is part of trying to make ability descriptions more accurate - this is the actual effect of what was described in the original version as "Strength+5%" (it didn't actually affect the Strength stat at all, but increased physical damage directly by 5%). Whereas an ability described as "Strength+5%" (which already also exists) would actually have the effect of raising the Strength stat by 5% of its previous value. The two do not have exactly the same impact on damage, especially taking into account the possibility of skills which do physical damage but aren't affected by the Strength stat (for example, perhaps an attack that does damage equal to 50% of the enemy's HP regardless of user's strength; Strength+5% wouldn't affect this, but Physical Damage+5% would mean it now does damage equal to 52.5% of the enemy's HP).

On a side note, you can also switch quickly between characters rather than having to exit out and go back in, by using Z / X on the keyboard, or the left and right shoulder buttons on a controller. There's no support for doing so with mouse input as of yet (for the record, touch input on mobile devices works identically to mouse input on desktop devices).

I'm not sure off-hand what I'll use the remaining area for. Maybe some of it can go to useless but interesting stats like number of enemies killed. Any suggestions are welcome, though.

[namida]

So, I realised I haven't posted updates in a while on this.

Just so you know, the remake attempt definitely isn't abandoned. I just don't have anything new to show, because everything I've been working on in the last few weeks for it is very behind-the-scenes stuff. Specifically, I've split the engine code into two seperate parts - a core package, which contains any code from it that would be useful in general for games; and the rest, code that's specific to this game itself. The main reason, of course, being so that I can re-use the code for other projects - none in mind at this stage, but I'd like to have the really "core" stuff available as a package if/when I do.

That aside, I've also been working on implementing a kind of script interpreter. This would be to handle events, and possibly enemy AI scripts. While initially my intent was to just write actual code and compile it into the EXE, I soon realised that while this works fine for enemy AI, it wouldn't work so well for events - because the code that they run needs to be possible to pause and resume (say for example, if it comes across a "show message box" - it then needs to halt execution until the player closes that message box, then resume from where it left off, which would be quite hard to do the way I originally had in mind). This is coming along quite nicely - although I've yet to actually test it, code's in place that should work for all the basic stuff (conditional branching, looping, managing boolean / numeric variables (haven't implemented support for string ones yet)). Yes, I could grab an existing one or use something like Lua, but there's two issues there - firstly, I hate working with (other people's) premade libraries and avoid it as much as possible (the remake still uses a grand total of one such library that isn't either part of FPC's or Lazarus's standard runtime libraries, or my own); and secondly, I also tend to find most existing scripting languages are awful. (And a distant third - I find doing these kind of challenging tasks fun.)

[namida]

Forgot to update the download link here when I migrated to OneDrive. It's fixed now.

[ccexplore]

Slightly out of topic but, what prompted the migration from Dropbox (IIRC) to OneDrive?  More free storage (though I thought Google Drive had more?)?

[namida]

Slightly out of topic but, what prompted the migration from Dropbox (IIRC) to OneDrive?  More free storage (though I thought Google Drive had more?)?

Better selective sync (Dropbox only lets you choose on the level of individual folders, OneDrive lets you select by individual files; and non-synced files still show up in Windows Explorer and are downloaded on-demand), better price for the 1TB plan ($70/yr on OneDrive, $100/yr on DropBox or Google Drive), can backup multiple folders (Google Drive has this one too, though), free copy of MS Office included (I prefer LibreOffice anyway, but it's useful for the occasional file that LibreOffice doesn't handle properly).

The biggest one was the price though.

Another reason for ruling out Google Drive is the fact that I use it at work; and I do a lot of work stuff on my personal machine. Not using the same provider helps reduce risk of putting something on the wrong account (similarly, I use different browsers for each, too - Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work stuff).

[namida]

I still hope to eventually, someday, remake this project in better quality. While I'd follow the original for the most part, this is about a culled plot thread that I really do want to work back in, so spoiler tagged just in case.

About the culled "side area" from Sysona forest, in some of the early demos

The intent was that this would lead to some kind of jail (or worse) for those who were seen as a threat to Sysona. The original intent was that it would turn out Tara and Leanna ultimately came from here - hence why their ultimate weapons are in Sysona. This was where the boss fight against Mia was originally going to take place - not that she was herself in on it, but rather, as was hinted at in Sysona's history, this was historically used as described as above, and while Mia had stopped ongoing use, she hadn't done anything about historical cases - perhaps even having killed them off herself (this line wasn't fully figured out, so some details were still undecided). Thus, it would have resulted in a 2-on-1 fight Tara/Leanna vs Mia, with the second ultimate weapon becoming available after this fight.

I do hope to remake this game with better qualtiy someday, even though realistically it's probably not going to happen (I just don't have the dedication, nor the skill to really get the graphics / music to a level I'm happy with). If I do, this thread will likely be worked back in - as part of the main story, not just a sidequest.

The only hint of this thread that ever existed was, in the early versions with debug menu, the Mia fight was accessible via debug menu, and played a sad music (the same one used in much of Alicia's flashback) instead of the generic boss music - the intent was that this music would play in the cutscene around the fight, and continue throughout the fight itself. It would also have been a fight where you didn't have the full party, instead with only Tara and Leanna participating.

As those who've played the game will note, in the final product, this side area doesn't exist, and the fight against Mia is pretty much a "fight me for the fun of it" thing that she challenges you to, with her being almost unambiguously a "good guy". The intent was never to make her a villian per se, but more someone who was really conflicted between covering up Sysona's nasty past vs doing the best she can in the present.