MZ - Tales of Frah'Akin RPG [UPDATED DEMO 2.0]

+ Very nice title screen, especially with the fact the characters are slightly animated with the wind blowing and the sky in the back moving.

+ Pretty star animation after selecting new game.

+ Like that you can skip the opening crawl if you don't want to deal with it.

+ As for the opening crawl itself, it's kind of insane to me what you can pull off with RPG Maker. The lore itself is pretty cool and the way it looks is sick.

+ Autosave is always good, even if I feel it's a bit excessive to autosave every time you leave the menu or go to another map.

+ The overworld sprites for the characters are quite adorable, and I like how there's lip motions for the characters when they're talking in cutscenes.

+ I like that there's a quest journal thing that tells you what to do next, as well as a compass. Not my cup of tea, but it could be useful for telling the player where to go next.

+ This mapping is actually quite gorgeous. There's so much detail stacked into every corner.

+ I gave cat food out of the goodness of my heart and got an MP Regen orb. Nice.

+ I'm not sure if this is an MZ thing for Visustella, but starting immediately on the equip slots for items without having to fumble with an obnoxious Equip-Optimize-Clear-Finish menu is very nice.

+ Ooh, this game has tooltips too.

+ I do like that the plot is very brisk and lets you explore quickly without being boggled down with nonsense, even if you didn't skip the lore at the start.

+ Oh, enemies are on the map and have line of sight so you can sneak around them. Though I do feel it's a bit too easy to cheese them.

+ I like the combo move system and that Ennea's MP naturally regenerates, although...

= Oh. Wow. The game has its own installer. A bit much, but alright.

= I'm seeing quite a few default Moghunter graphics.

= Ooh. Ow. My computer doesn't like the opening lore cutscene, even with an 8GB upgrade. It stops and starts every so often.

= Natures from Pokémon are in this? Alright.

= I am ambivalent towards this voice acting. It's quite wooden but it's not offensive. But it still works better here with the big CG busts than little sprites talking at least.

= I've gotten like, six potions (not counting the secret one in the chest above Mr. unicorn) before I even go into combat. Quite generous.

= Aehlevander is the spitting image of Helios from Sailor Moon, even down to the fact he's a white-robed man with white hair with a golden crystal in his head that turns into a unicorn.

= The story is not bad, but it's also not too terribly exciting either. It just feels like generic fantasy fare, especially with all of the "Age of Darkness" talk.

= We pick up 6 bags of flour for a dude, a task they could have done themselves, and then he gives us his ranch hand to take on an adventure. It feels a bit abrupt, like I didn't get much of a read on this guy's personality.

- (!!) Oh no... you have all of this custom art yet you stuck to the default RTP sound effects... and default orange bar for HP... and the default font...

- No keyboard rebinding. A bit more reasonable considering this is MZ, but still.

- Oh. Uh-oh. I played without skipping the intro story and it seems to have started the actual in-game cutscene, because once the intro ended, it stuck me immediately onto the map with Ennea and her talking unicorn guy without seeing that CG where she's sitting against the water. Oops.

- (!!!) The game is VERY resource intensive, as I could barely get 13+ frames even on the map the game starts at. Certain maps drops it down to single digit framerate, which I can only assume is the fault of visual effects + Visustella's obfuscation making the game's job harder than it needs to be.

(In maps without effects and menus, it goes up to 30 frames only, which isn't that much better.)

- Something I don't like about the compass is that it tells you where treasure chests are, even hidden ones, as well as the fact it doesn't actually highlight exits.

- Strange how the two arrow buttons on the equipment screen block the text box, but not in Skills.

- I think it's quite bizarre how you have items on the shelves that can be bought separately from talking to the shopkeeper, but they don't have markers above them to signify to the player that they can even be bought until you rub right up next to them. If @hiddenone didn't bring this up, I would never have known.

(Especially since it doesn't seem to be a one-and-done event where you give 100 gold, but another shopkeeper event that ONLY sells the potion while he has potions in his main stock? Very weird, makes me wonder what the point is.)

- There's a grass-steppy noise when you run in this specific location, yet not on the other side.

- Why does the regular attack of the wolves do 33 damage, but the special charge-up animation Scratch do like, 24? It doesn't make sense to me.

- Why is the Ground Herb (and other crafting materials) able to be used in combat if it does nothing?

- (!!) Not a fan of this combat. I do like the effort put into making it so you can't spam Normal Attack, but the Press Turn Combat system effect where you get an extra turn for nailing enemies with their elemental weakness + stunning them seems quite unbalanced.

Especially since Ennea has regenerating MP to just keep using her attacks to keep spamming her moves. I don't have anything against this MP regen effect, but when combined with the Press Turn Combat function, things get pretty mindless.

- Oh... do the bees have Reflex (aka. auto-dodge physical attacks)? Strange that they don't have a tooltip telling the player about this, especially when you pretty much have to transform to do anything about them as Aehlevander.

- Auto-battle? Mmmm. I'd rather not have any mechanic that auto-plays the game for me.

- OH UH. I saw Aehlevander's sprite zip-zoop over the map for a second after killing the forest wolves before his position corrected. Wonder what that's about. (It also happened again when we beat the forest wolves boss.)

It also happened to Ennea's portrait sprite when she talked to Elmir.

- "It can restore the full HP and MP of whoever drinks its water." sounds pretty strange. I think you should have it say "It can fully restore the HP and MP of whoever drinks from it."

- The Forest Wolf Boss, as the first boss fight, is quite terrible. It's kind of just mash attack until you beat the boss, since he's a big HP sponge. The minions don't really do anything notable since they get splattered by using Forest Slash (your AOE that stuns them) while the boss wolf himself has so much HP that it makes fighting him a slog.

For reference's sake, it took me 16 turns to kill him. His minions died way before that.

- THE BOSS HEALS HIMSELF. NOOOOOOOO. He heals for 388(!) in a fight where you do 70 (unboosted) / 111 (boosted, which is only possible because of the demo-exclusive skill that Aehlevander has). This is a bad decision because bosses that heal themselves are very contentious. If done poorly, it does nothing but extend the boss fight and doesn't really make the fight more interesting.

- Wouldn't it make sense to just allow the player to enter Master Fennlisher's house if they wanted to? There's not really a point having to talk to the NPCs if you already figured it out / get told where it is explicitly after the first NPC, it just seems like padding.

- "So many weapons and armor!" feels weird. "So much weaponry and armor" would probably work better.

Here's the thing. It's a gorgeous game. There's an insane amount of effort on the art side of things.

But there's a lot of little annoying things:
* The continued existence of default RTP sounds and other things like the default font
* The framerate absolutely SUFFERS when the game is any map that isn't indoors / in combat. This is likely the fault of the plugins you're using.
* The combat itself being quite easy to break and not all that exciting due to balancing issues. It was pretty dull.

Also, from what I saw of the story, it just seemed like your typical "save the world, young hero" type of fantasy story where you have to fight the dark lord and his underlings. I couldn't get much of a read on the actual personalities of the characters, since they just kind of stayed in their lanes - Aehlevander is the stoic and serious guardian, Ennea is the bold-but-conflicted warrior princess and the farmer guy you got at the end didn't stay long enough to get a read on his personality.

Ennea stood out due to the fact she actually did seem troubled by the state of the world, and her talk with the griffin NPC was somewhat interesting, but it was also quite cryptic. I want to see it actually build into something instead of just being a vague threat.

That said! I am rooting for you to succeed with this, since it's clear you've put in an incredible amount of effort already.