Alright, I finished the game and unlocked hard mode. It was much tougher this time around, so good job with the balancing.
There's a handful of typos and bugs:
During the conversation with Alexandra, she says
"Please come back safe. Should things get bad, we'll warp you out immediatly."
There's a typo there.
In the dialogue with the matchup attendant, she says you'll "win a price" rather than "prize."
If you enter the elevator on the third floor, the shopping mall is misspelled as shopping "mile."
The Captain's encourage still lists it as working for 3 turns rather than 2.
Were the party members meant to have updated dialogue after you clear the city? They still had the same lines after the volcano was unlocked.
If you learn an ability, it unequips all of the player party's items for the people who learned new skills. I've also had equipment unequip on all my characters while shopping but I can't reliably duplicate it.
I got a profile error when opening the game. It said my profile can't be used because it's from a newer version of NW.js.
The sniper doesn't use her gun in the animations for her bullet techniques.
A few plugin suggestions:
Here's a Japanese version of a character part creator. It's in Japanese but it seems to have ears parts selectable.
https://forum.tkool.jp/index.php?threads/プラグイン-キャラクターメイク.326/
Here's a plugin below you might like. It lets the player hold enter and fast forward during battles. It saves a lot of time during fights and makes gameplay go quicker.
http://mvplugins.com/plugin/Shoichiro/SSEP BattleSpeedUp
Yanfly battle ai core will let you make the battle AI for enemies who buff and heal their allies smarter. The fairies for example frequently cast heal on themselves when they're at full HP or buff their attack while it's already buffed. There's also a setting in the battle ai core to force the enemies to always attack party members who are at low HP, which would completely change how this game is played. It would let you give your bosses some allies who only ever buff and heal the boss and not themselves and make the regular enemies coordinate to take down the party.
A few thoughts on gameplay strategy and some ideas:
Being able to run from fights is really nice. There were a few times that I loaded the game and my characters sword was unequipped, but I was able to run, equip my gear and then go back into the fight.
The fact that enemies have elemental weaknesses makes the characters who use elements even more valuable.
I like that the characters all have means of dealing damage without needed to be in the front row. In the previous versions you'd spend a lot of time attacking, stepping back and then using an ability and repeating the process.
If I had known how valuable Lumen were, I'd have spent hours farming them. I always wondered why I never seemed to gather any Dream Essence. I ended the game with 3 of them. Well, Lumen drop it, and killing a few dozen of them will make things much, much easier for you.
In the end I never used the upgrade feature to improve weapons and armor as I always held off until I got to the next tier of gear. Higher tier gear can use better addons, such as silvers, as well as having extra slots and better stats. But I finished the game at level 15 so I didn't even see all the really good stuff.
If you spent the max amount of attack increases on raising the power of your weapons, then you could clear enemies much quicker, but upgrading low tier weapons means you miss out on the improved upgrades of the future weapons. Is there a way to salvage or remove weapon/armor upgrades? I'm under the impression that it's impossible. If I did this a second time, I'd have just farmed Lumens and then maxed out a set of tier 6 weapons and armor.
I did one spirit hunt but questioned what the point was. The only thing available to buy as a reward was those elemental boost earrings. Am I meant to grind on encounters to get 10 points to fight the spirit, then I'm meant to fight this same guy 5 times just to buy 1 earring? The spirit is way too powerful to justify that.
I preferred the spirit eggs in the previous versions over this current incarnation. The spirits don't immediately give stat bonuses anymore and their powers are really weak. I think I did less than 200 points of damage with the lightning spirit's attack, and it cost 10 gauge points.
The level requirements take a lot of the fun out of getting rare drops. I don't really care at all if I loot a powerful weapon since I know I'll have to grind the character to meet the requirements anyways to equip it. Added to the fact that characters you aren't using in battle don't gain EXP, it means you have to work pretty hard to train anyone you haven't touched yet and that means bringing them into tough areas where they don't have high quality gear or levels.
I liked being able to create a custom character. Perhaps instead of having the player avatar be unable to fight, they'll be allowed to play a custom mimic class? You could be given the ability to learn any class' abilities and use a special shape shifting weapon, but you're limited to only learning a set number of abilities and thus can't copy all of them.
This will enable the player to have something special about them while not taking away from the other classes or replacing them. There could be a shop next to the beauty salon where the player avatar learns their skills in exchange for ability fragments. It would give a reason why the player is unique and they're leading the expedition rather than just having you play as one of the other characters.
Because finishing a "round" of enemies and starting the next wave doesn't give your party the +2 AP that they get from everyone having a turn in a fight, you're heavily encouraged to use cheap, low cost attacks to finish off enemies and conserve points. It means expensive and orange attacks have a much higher cost than they seem. The cost to use an orange attack is -2 AP from needing to attack, + having to then use the attack. After that, your character is in the back row and probably doesn't have enough AP to attack or use any abilities, so they're forced to focus.
Meanwhile, you earn +2 AP on the end of every round and you could just keep attacking basically for free. Also, if you finish a round with 0 AP, the enemies will all get free strikes on your characters while you have to focus up so you can fight back. Not to mention you'll deal more damage in the long run with basic attacks than you will for having used expensive orange attacks. The orange moves aren't balanced with this in mind, so there are some with weak effects that don't match up to multiple basic attacks.
So the criteria that I choose characters is based on a strategy where I want useful abilities at low costs that help end rounds with my characters having mostly full AP and which are strong in boss battles.
Here's my thoughts on all the characters and a few suggestions about them.
Monolith is the greatest character in this game. He's got offense, he's got defense. Since you need to waste a turn attacking to get back to the front row after each cast of the orange dark magics, they won't see as much use, but the spells are pretty effective. The HP cost can easily be mitigated by keeping a healer/having someone toss items.
Perhaps Soul Drain could instead just do a large amount of damage to a boss? There's never a good time to use this technique since every boss resists it. The cost is pretty high too so usually in regular battles you could just use waste a couple of times on an enemy and kill them. It's really the only one of Monolith's attacks that isn't any good.
The
Hero class is okay, he just suffers from the fact that his skills are balanced around a play style where you always have his gauge ability activated. It means less gauge points to go around and there's better things to spend it on. If you play the hero, you base your whole strategy around him. It gives him less synergy with other classes that have good gauge abilities because you won't use them both in the same party.
The
Elementalist is the best class in the game. His entire strategy is based around giving himself enhanced strikes and his healing power is top notch. So it doesn't matter if you use up his AP with elemental dances, because all he's meant to do is just hit people anyways. My only complaint is that using basic attacks every turn is boring and it would be nice if he had more variety in his attacks, but he's very solid as is.
The elementalist could really use some more attacks. The class' gameplay is basically basic attacking a lot and then occasionally using an expensive ability. All the other classes get to do something interesting every few turns but really the best way to play this guy is to save up all your AP, attack a lot and then heal if needed.
The
preacher suffered in this class rebalance a bit. She's most useful for being able to cast attack magic at a low cost. Her healing abilities are essentially just the cheapest items in the game but they cost AP instead. Besides her gauge ability and the light magic, she could be replaced by anyone for very little cost. Anyone can use healer 1s and curers and they don't consume any AP to do so. She would benefit from her healing powers not using up her turn, as that's something items can't do.
Or if her healing was 25% + magic attack x (x amount), so her stats matter for something other than using light magic. Or if her healing provided a "barrier" effect where it'll give you temporary health to block damage from future attacks. She gets less and less useful as the game goes on. There are some basic enemies who can kill a character in 2 or 3 hits and her healing can't keep up with that.
The
Assassin has always been pretty mediocre, mainly because her skills are very expensive for little payoff. Her poison seems to have been over nerfed to the point where it's useless against non bosses. I've seen it do as little as 25 points of damage on regular enemies and testing it against a boss in the forest it did 100.
Poison has a bit more use against bosses but it still deals very little damage and overall you don't want to waste time poisoning basic enemies. This is because your characters can easily kill basic monsters AND the monsters hit so hard that a stall strategy will hurt you more than ending them fast. You might as well save all of your AP for when it matters most, the last fight.
There's never a situation where you want to hide, because the enemies hit so hard that the only thing preventing the party from being KOed is everyone equally being a target. If you have a 1 in 4 chance of being hit, that spreads the damage out equally to all of your party members unless you get bad RNG and the enemies randomly focus on the same person. If one person is selfish, the other characters WILL get hit more and likely die. Even in a situation where you're injured, a healer 2 only costs 250 coins and heals a party member for 50% of their health.
Her double attack ability has some potential but at 8 points? Realistically you won't get much use out of that, especially since it's an orange attack. She has a stun which can skip a target's turn, but the Manipulator can do that cheaper and more reliably. The poison slash is another orange attack that could be good, but then the Hero and Monolith are both better at the hit everyone at once game for more damage and a better payoff. The poison stab is the best ability. It has a fair cost and a balanced effect, though poison could stand to be stronger.
All in all, this character would greatly benefit from the use of Yanfly's auto passive states plugin. You could give her a passive ability that gives her an excellent damage bonus against poisoned/targets suffering from a status ailment. It gives her synergy with the other status causing classes. Or maybe as an assassin, she could have a random chance to cause instant death to targets when she hits them. If the effect activates on a boss, it could just do a critical hit. Perhaps even a coup de grace attack that auto criticals/kills electrified/frozen enemies.
The
Sniper had a rebalance and instead of being a burst damage class is now an excellent tool to cause status ailments. Well balanced and has excellent effects. The attacks all being blue makes this class very viable. The expense of bullet rain makes it not especially useful for the cost so I always just use strikes.
As far as expanding the class, maybe the sniper could learn abilities that give them special bonuses against certain enemy types? Or some more debuffs, like a spotter ability that points out an enemy's weakness and causes the next attack against them to be a critical. The class itself just serves to debuff and attack occasionally now so it would be good for them to have more stuff to do in a fight.
Captain would be much better if he got a power boost from the amount of people he's buffing or his buffs lasted longer + hit multiple targets. He could even get the ability to intercept attacks for allies. Or if his attack power got greater the lower his health becomes. Anything to give his class some personality. Or if he had a healing power. He's totally not worth using as is.
Buffs that last for only 2 turns aren't nearly valuable enough to cost 4 points, especially compared to Monolith's ability to debuff an enemy for 2 turns. Debuffing an enemy's defense is basically the same thing as boosting the entire party's attack power. I never used the Captain because of this. His defense buff is even worse since a party member only has a 1 in 4 chance of being attacked so you'll either get very little use out of the buff and it'll expire before you get attacked, or you'll very rarely get to use it.
And his buffs are mechanically the same as the defense/attack boost items. But you don't spend 4 AP using one of those. Granted he can cast 2 buffs in 1 turn, but instead of taking a guy who only has the power to enhance other people, I could just use someone who deals damage on his own.
On a side note, a major weakness of buffs in this battle system is that slow characters who use them are heavily punished. At the end of the "round" all statuses proc and count down. For example having the preacher use an attack boost on the Elementalist who has already had a turn means that the buff now only has 1 turn left on it after preacher ends her turn. For this reason, the Captain needs to be balanced to be the fastest character in the game, otherwise you're better off just throwing buff items on the Assassin, because Captain's too slow to get the full benefit out of buffing faster characters than himself.
The
Manipulator just sorta exists. The other classes are more flashy but it has some unique effects. Negative status effects don't last long enough to be worth curing in most cases. She's notable for being better at self buffing than the Captain is, at a lower cost and with special effects Captain doesn't get. The magic barrier is really sweet. The fact that it doesn't expire until you get hit by magic is fantastic.
Perhaps she would be more useful if her status absorbing power took ailments from all allies and then she could redirect them to all enemies? You really don't care about debuffing or statusing basic enemies anyways when you could just be killing them. Or if absorbing a status ailment gave her a positive benefit.
IE, Absorb poison and get health regen. Absorb a lightning effect and now you resist lightning and perform lightning attacks.
Would really make the Manipulator want to absorb status ailments. This character is still way better than the assassin and the captain.
Blood Driver could benefit from Reaper Drive having a guaranteed enemy attack chance. Granted it's already a 75% chance, but as it is you're just hoping your enemies actually strike the character for the cost of losing out on 1 AP. It's gambling. Meanwhile the other abilities allow you to deal guaranteed damage and you power them with AP. This attack might be more worth using if it offered some extra self buffing benefits but as it stands you have to depends on luck.
Granted, with the AP regen addon you can negate the negative side effect, but you don't come upon those very easily. And if one does drop, it's going to be from a Lumen, but you won't be able to use it until you have Tier 5 armor, as it's a silver, not a bronze.
Razing edge is a nice and gimmicky ability, letting you attack 3 times in 1 turn. Bloody Harvest is nice and I only wish it lasted longer. It is pretty nice that there are multiple ways to regain HP with this class. If bleeding did percentile damage over time, then I'd play this character. Otherwise, I just don't have room for her on the team with other characters being better.
All in all your game is fun. Thanks for making it. I enjoyed playing it.
