MZ - Foxblade Fable - A retro furry JRPG

+ Lovely title screen & theme music. The TV filter wasn’t something I was expecting, but it is kind of neat.

+ This game looks gorgeous. The custom sprites and the extra frames of animation for certain things really bring it to life. (Like, your little dude has running sprites! You barely see people do that)

+ The battle animations are just as good-looking, especially your own characters. Shame the enemies don’t really react to anything, but the fact they’re animated stops them from being completely static.

+ Ooh, you get accessory slots when you level up?! That’s very Kingdom Hearts of you. I like it when leveling up in a JRPG gives you more benefits than just stats.

+ I like the idea of the Daunting shield system – hit an enemy with a weakness to drain their shield faster and capitalize when their guard is broken. It’s a common mechanic that works for a reason, although within reason. (Also, I love how the enemy shifts between hues to make them all rainbow-y. That’s very neat.)

+ The dialogue is serviceable. I am curious what the plot’s going to be after you leave the dungeon.

+ The guaranteed crit chance skill is pretty neat, even if it removes itself the instant you actually hit that enemy.

+ I do like that there's no failure rate for escaping from random encounters.

+ Once I finally understood how the battle system worked, I found it to be quite interesting. Your non-magical Techs use action points, and you can use them at any time. You gain AP every time your turn comes and you can stack it up by guarding instead of attacking.

But if you use a tech while at a deficit (eg. 1 AP but use a move that has 3), your character is on cooldown and can’t act for as long as they have negative AP. That’s pretty cool.

= I do think it’s a bit obnoxious whenever the tutorial of the game says “When your HP reaches zero, it’s game over!”, if only because it’s so obvious. I’d only ever bring it up if dropping to 0 HP actually meant something different in your game.

= It is a bit goofy that the boss can counter your scan move and hurt you. I’d code in a custom exception for that.

- No rebindable keys, which is unfortunate. But this IS an MZ game so it’s a bit more understandable.

- I think here, more than ever, you need custom sound effects tailor-made for your game. The default RTP sound effects stand out like a sore thumb (eg. the “whoosh” when an enemy attacks, or the “bwuah” death FX when an enemy dies). You really gotta work on replacing those.

Especially due to the fact you’re already replacing most of the UI sound effects with custom ones, so why not go all the way?

- I don’t really understand how the MP in this game works. Pierce’s Ember spell says it only takes 1 MP, yet when he actually does use it, it deducts like, 20 from his set. Visual glitch? Or am I missing something here?

- I’m gonna keep it a thousand, I’m not really fond of “random encounter” games, especially given that the only real monsters you fight in the first dungeon are just the slime guys and the evil fly creatures. It’s a very mash-attack kinda game: pelt them with your strongest stuff.

- The pipe maze got quite a bit confusing due to the fact you needed to juggle three different symbols (sun, star and moon) just to get through it, not helped by the random encounters.

- The fight with the Scythe Queen was interesting due to the fact you had to kill her minions so she didn’t get all of her shield gauge, but due to the restrictive MP costs, it felt almost luck-based if you could break through her Daunt shield. If you don’t, you eat a party-wide attack that deals 200-300 damage that can certainly kill you.

For the first boss in the game, she just felt like a damage sponge and those are never fun to deal with in JRPGs, especially right at the start of the game.

Very short and sweet experience. I can see you were trying to create a more traditional JRPG and you succeeded in a big way, especially due to the amount of cool custom art and your unique ATB action system with the Action Point system.

That said, I’m not really a fan of “random encounter” games, and the first boss was quite damage-spongey. I’m not sure what I would have done if I didn’t find that Ether, since I’m not the type of player to grind through games to gain levels unless it’s really obvious you need to do so.

Maybe have MP recover by 5 every time you land a normal attack and/or guard so you don’t get completely stranded in fights where you need elemental weaknesses to burn through barriers?

Still, I can’t wait to see this game once it’s properly fleshed out with more stuff to do. This one has a bright future ahead of it.