MV - Emberbound: Champion of Chains

Plugins:
Yanfly
Fallen Angel Olivia
Victor Sant
HimeWorks
Galv
SRDude
Shaz
SMO
Triacontane
Julian "Szyu" Heinen
Biud436
Cutievirus
Mr. Trivel

Art:
Kadokawa
Medieval Asian Fantasy Weapons Pack [Copyright](C) Bis
Whtdragon
Waywardmartian
Hiddenone
SmashArtist
TheUnproPro
Milu

Music & Sound Effects:
Kadokawa
Karugamo
SoundEffectsFactory
QuickSounds

Itch.io link:
Emberbound: Champion of Chains
Trailer:
Emberbound: Champion of Chains Trailer (YouTube)

There’s a bit of a disconnect between your product thread/logo/page, which has the main title of the game as Emberbound, and the download itself which calls itself (and is in the folder) Champion of Chains. And then the game window itself has yet another name, wherein your project appears to have been named Testi Felix. Some people could get confused trying to keep track of this.

The music in the opening cutscene starts off cool, but then gets weird - the opening bit is this minor, martial sound, appropriate for a dungeon. And then these instruments start doing jazzy riffs on top of it, which is really strange for the setting.

The cursor is way too dark for the background of your windowskin. I literally couldn’t see that dark red, translucent rectangle on the name input screen.

Also, I strongly recommend you use a keyboard input plugin for that - Yanfly has a free one, there’s pretty much zero excuse for putting out a computer game where your players are guaranteed to have a keyboard at hand (pun intended), but you force them to click or scroll around to select letters individually.

To beat someone is “whup” - “whoop” is a cheering noise.

When you’re talking to the guard in the jail cell, it’s a bit confusing to follow the conversation. When you don’t use any faces, you don’t show name boxes, and the message windows are all in the same place, the player is just guessing from context who is saying which things.

It would make better visual sense if you had the message windows going at the top and bottom of the screen as the characters alternated talking. Plus, being right in the middle means the window is completely obscuring both characters who are in the conversation.

Oddly enough, you do this in most other conversations.

I know this is a stylistic thing that some games do, I personally find the sound effect when you walk into impassable tiles to be pretty annoying. Especially since it doesn’t just play once, but continues if you have the button held down, and especially since it's not some dull thud but a freaking punching noise.

I find it particularly annoying when there are situations where I need to turn to activate an event - say, I walk up to the right of my cellmate, then I need to face left in order to talk to him. It sounds like I’m punching him; you might want to look into a plugin that allows the first key press to turn you in place.

When you get to the arena, again: the dark grey color for your arena rank (“Unknown”) is very poorly legible against the black background.

After the fight…how does your cellmate know how you made the fight look?

In the skill learn menu, the skill’s cost would look better if it had a space between the value and the resource - “15 STA” rather than “15STA”.

The battle system is okay - I assume there become more interesting decisions as the game goes on. But the first two arena fights were very simplistic - I just used Attack except one time when the enemies were out-damaging me, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t die. The enemies don’t even use any of the charging skills that you learned to counter in the tutorials. That plus only controlling one actor means battle is not very interesting.

I completed the first two arena story fights.

I’m not a fan of the MV3D look, so I won’t get into that; however, the look of the maps was generally good. They weren’t too large, they had an appropriate level of details, I like them.

The English is generally good. There are some small errors, like

• one of the messages in the combat tutorial ended with a period instead of a comma even though it was only a clause.
• A period instead of a question mark after “wouldn’t you agree”.
• “Your rank has been promoted” isn’t correct. You’d say the rank is increased or you’ve been promoted.
• I”m not sure why there’s a hyphen in the skill descriptions for the damage. It’s, for example, “slashing damage” not “slashing-damage”.
• “You leave me at awe” isn’t correct.

- I think it would be nice to give the named characters a name box, just for clarity's sake.

- Your cursor is kinda hard to see against the dark background. Not impossible, but enough that some people could have issues.

- Small thing, but consider locking menu access until after inputting your name. It's a tad weird to open the menu, see the default name of Felix, then be asked to input a name.

- Getting the shard from Rock, Paper, Scissors kinda sucks, as it seems to be entirely random. I don't yet know what getting twenty shards will do (I only gathered seventeen so far), but maybe consider a less time consuming way to get that one.

- The sound when you bounce against the wall is a bit obnoxious. A more lowkey sound would do wonders.

- I like the fact that you encourage always re-exploring the prison, despite only having access to very few areas, in order to unlock a lot of optional fights.

- That said, I do wonder how well the game is balanced if you avoid or just fail to unlock the optional fights. The equipment and gold from them have really helped, so I hope that missing them isn't too detrimental.

- Speaking of fights, I gotta give credit on not making them simple exchanges of attacks, at least after the initial battles. Needing to carry throwables for certain attacks was a smart design choice, and I also like the fact that bombs are so useful, but hard to get the ingredients for. Add in the fact that you need money to craft them and it makes you consider the best times to use them, lest you want to be grinding gold to pay for them.