Okay, let's continue - I'll probably end up skipping a few points I wanted to mention when I started writing this text, due to the fact I haven't been having enough free time lately. My plan was to write the whole thing right after finishing the Demo, but y'know, things don't work out as planned sometimes. Anyway, here we go:
The battles, oh man, it feels so good to spend the first turn making preparations, raising my defenses - the array of options we have to work with is perfect, in my opinion: we don't have that many Skills and items, but man, each and every one of them feels like it deserves to be there - it has a purpose within the structure you've built. Not only that, I'm a big fan of games that trade numbers for consistency - in other words, I'd rather fight five interesting monsters than fight twenty shallow ones where I would only need to spam the attack button. I think the balance you've achieved in distribution and difficulty level is a plus - I could spend the entire day mentioning in detail all of the enemies' gimmicks and strategies I had to come up with in order to defeat them, but let's just say it was a great experience.
Now, that doesn't mean everything is great about the battle-system. Even though I applaud the balance you've achieved, there are still a few things that create a feeling of frustration from time to time. I've lost count of how many times I tried to understand the huge variability the characters' attacks have - I understand that certain enemies have strengths and weaknesses, but the fact of the matter is that, even after hours of gameplay, attacks and items would cause incredibly low damage to the enemies - from Mara's attacks to Poison Knives; from grenades to any other kind of elemental fragment - all of them had felt useless more times than I could count, specially when facing the sponge-like bosses, that even after being completely neutralized, would still be a pain to overcome simply because of the low damage the heroes were dealing.
Now, what would I have done differently? Personally, I think the heroes should always be faster than the enemies - specially when dealing with the ones that can poison you, or cause any other negative stat. There's nothing more frustrating than being on a situation where you take damage, come up with a good strategy to come back on top, but fail because the bees are faster than everyone. Not only that, I think consumable items should receive a buffy-buff - specially the Poison Knife, even if it means reducing the percentage of life the effect will decrease, at least give it a higher chance of actually poisoning the enemy. Why? Because it's so damn satisfying =D
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On visuals, I won't say anything about the Tilesets and Add-ons - everything related to the maps is nothing less than perfection, in my opinion. Okay, certain maps are a bit chaotic, full of information, but the sheer amount of detail you've put into them, specially the organic ones, full of grass, cliffs, flowers, etc - they're gorgeous! Fun fact, though: it's hard for a game to actually catch my attention nowadays, since I'm always busy working on my personal projects - the one map that has made me download your game was the one with the ruins, I have a thing for ruins s2
Now, the more original pieces. First of all, congrats for taking the time to create your own portraits for the characters - we have so many options of pre-made faces and busts nowadays, that not everyone will actually try their own thing, specially given the high quality of the resources we can find out there. I'll start by saying that I've had kind of a problem with the characters' faces throughout the game - they don't go with my personal taste, but I'm able to remain neutral about it - the problem, though, is the fact that, not only I feel they don't match with the game's overall tone, but they also don't represent the characters' emotions accurately. Mara is the one that's gotten me the most confused: from her faces, I couldn't understand if she was being shy, annoyed, embarassed, sad, nervous, uncomfortable, during her key pieces of dialogue. I'll go into more details later, but for now, I would recommend a complete change in the color pallet, and maybe a little bit of editing so that the characters look a bit less... cartoony, so to speak.
Next time, maybe, just maybe, I'll start talking about my favorite element: character development ^^
