VXAce - The Cube Trail - Demo Version 1.3 [Comedic Fantasy RPG]

Charles: A Warrior who washed ashore with amnesia. Charles is chivalrous, loves studying nature, and gets easily distracted around animals. His combat focus is Tanking and Control.


Fey: An Elf who is visiting the Island. While looking for her mother, she loses all of her Silver and gets trapped on the Island. She gets jealous easily, and is generally cheerful. Her combat focus is Damage and Healing.

Emma: A girl who lives on the Island. She is bored with life, and spends most of her time reading romance novels like Fantasy Star Love!!!. Her combat focus is Buffing and Debuffing.

Natalie (not available in demo): A Shaman who lives on the Island. Hidden away in a monster community, she is destined to marry another one of her kind, but doesn't want to. Her combat focus is Damage and Control.

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George: A Mage who washed ashore with amnesia. George loves fashion, sarcastic comebacks, and is obsessed with loot. His combat focus is Damage and Control.


Otto: A Brawler who is visiting the Island. Otto is a man of few words, and who's fighting techniques are unrivaled among the Island's inhabitants. His combat focus is Damage and Control.


Collin: A Bard who is visiting the Island. Collin enjoys underground music techniques like tri-tones, double bass drumming, and changing time signatures. His combat focus is Healing and Buffing.

Amber (not available in demo): A Vampire who lives on the Island. Secluded in the Cube Trail, Amber watches the struggles of the Island through her crystal ball. Her combat focus is Tanking and Debuffing.

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Clair: A Priestess who washed ashore with amnesia. Clair is bubbly, cheerful and loves meeting people. Her combat focus is Healing and Buffing.


Stella: A Soul Mage who is visiting the Island. Even though she won the "Miss Heroine" contest, Stella is shunned by many for her soul-powered magic. Her combat focus is Damage and Control.

Willow: A Chaos Priestess who is visiting the Island. Blessed by both the God of Heaven and God of the Abyss, Willow was thrown out of the Priestess-hood for being "too clumsy". Her combat focus is Healing and Debuffing.

Peter: A Paladin, Peter is visiting the Island. Known as the Evoker of Heaven, he is disparagingly told he "evokes too much Heaven". His combat focus is Tanking and Damage.

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Sophie: A Sailor who washed ashore with amnesia. Sophie is the only one who remembers her family, and loves sailing. Her combat focus is Damage and Control.


Cory: A Juggler who lives on the Island. Cory has a vendetta with Alfus, but doesn't like to talk about it with others. His combat focus is Damage and Buffing.

Robert: A Captain who is visiting the Island. Forced to retire from navy life, he wanders looking for a new purpose. His combat focus is Healing and Buffing.

Blueberry (not available in demo): A Dragon who lives on the Island. Blueberry is much smaller than other dragons, but is nearly as powerful. His combat focus is Tanking and Debuffing.

First thing I noticed is that the light window background makes it hard to read the white words, especially if the tiles under it happen to be light-colored as well. People with better eyesight may not have a problem, but it started to give me a headache after a bit of reading so it may be a good idea to either outline the letters in black or darken the window so that the white letters stand out better.

The intro is short and lets me get to the gameplay quickly, which is nice, but it seems like it may be set to parallel process instead of autorun since I could turn the character in place while Dereck walks up to me. I do think that giving a lot of controls at once is a mistake though. Since the first time I can fight is after the intro, I had already forgotten what had been said about the which parameters affect what. Instead, having a tutorial fight where those details are explained would make it easier to remember since the player can see how things work.

Speaking of a tutorial fight, I really think that would be a good idea. There's the fight with the slime, but nothing is actually explained during that fight which felt like a waste to me. It took me a few battles to realize that the skills are only available once per fight, which would have really helped when I was trying to figure out a strategy for the fights with the bats. I also would have loved if 'Impacted Armor' had been explained. It felt like another name for 'Miss' to me, since I couldn't see any rhyme or reason to when it happened, but if there was some reason to it I wish I had known it so that I could have tried to use it to my advantage. Having luck affect battles is fine, but it's important to let the player know how it affects battles and how (if at all) they can do things to get Lady Luck on their side during a turn.

Once I got used to battles the bat fights in the Seaside Sentinel weren't too bad, though a bit more variation in the troops would have been nice.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I was stuck after reaching the top of the Seaside Sentinel. I had the Ring of Recall, but I had used all my Souls to recover after my first few fights that went poorly so I couldn't use it (well, I could use it to go to "Previous Place", but that just caused the game to crash because it didn't have the data for Map000 :rswt). I went back outside of the tower, but there didn't seem to be any map transfer that I could find. It's important to make it obvious to the player where transfers are so they don't get stuck like I did, so maybe add a path where any transfers are. Since I didn't find a way to leave, I stopped playing there.

I ran into a few things that seemed odd to me, or could use some adjustments. The dialogue scrolling when there's more than four lines in cool, but it seemed strange that the faces would scroll away too. I assume that's due to a script, so I don't know if you can fix it but it would be nice if the face stayed still while only the words moved. I was unable to use the Soul Wheel, which was a shame since it seemed like it could've been fun but the guy only talked about playing it and never gave me the option. Personally I found the tint in the Seaside Sentinel too be too dark on my monitor, as it was hard to see where the bats ended and the walls began during battles. Instead of making it just dark, you could make the tint more blue or purple to make it feel darker without actually making the screen hard to see.

The intro to the town was set to parallel process like the beach intro, but unlike on the beach I was able to move... Which meant that I could walk to the church and enter it before the map finished scrolling. So the town intro didn't finish properly, and it restarted once I left the church after removing the mask. Setting the event to autorun should fix that issue.

Overall, even though I got stuck pretty quickly and wish there were some more details about battles, this was a fun little game. Best of luck improving and finishing it. :)

Your maps are looking good and the lighting details are nice, though I think you could weaken the sun beams a little bit because they are distracting. It would also be nice if you added some buffer to the map edges. At the moment a lot of the entrances are right up against the edge, meaning that the party is hidden behind the message box during a lot of cutscenes. Even if you don't add a lot of movement to cutscenes (which could look cool, but is a lot of work), having the party be more visible on the map would add a lot.

The fact each possible main character has their own personality is nice, though I didn't play far enough to see how different their lives really are. The writing worked well, but I think having an editor or at least someone else go over it would be good because there are minor spelling and grammar errors here and there. The quest journal is a great resource, but I don't think you need to have it pop up after every single change. Often an npc would tell me what to do, and then the quest journal popped up to repeat that as if I didn't just learn what to do next. I'm sure some players would find that helpful, but I didn't so it would be nice if there was an option to turn it off in-game.

I tried the mage, priestess, and sailor characters and found the mage to be the best option because Otto's One-Two skill was the best way to do damage. The other party members were interesting, but their skills just didn't measure up... Especially since their skills all missed about a third of the time! With such a limited amount of AP and choices in battle it's really painful for those skills to miss so often. I can understand them only doing 1 damage, since you want it to be tough and random, but having the enemy completely dodge or the skill miss made it almost feel like using skills was worthless.

And this is a minor annoyance, but Dereck offering to help out my character with a place to stay and then not being able to sleep there felt cruel. I had to make sure to save some coins after any shopping trip to be able to heal at the inn, and even if it was only 2 coins it still added up since I had to heal after almost every fight.

Battles in the first dungeon were tough, too tough. As I mentioned earlier, I spent a lot of time on the game over screen and that was often because my attacks would miss and the enemies would use attacks that did 12+ damage to my measly <10 health. I know it's random, but it's demoralizing to start a battle and get wiped out in the first turn just because the enemies could target the whole party with their skill... I ended up avoiding battles as much as I could, because it felt like that's what the game wanted me to do.

All the possible enemy types was interesting, but there were too many at the start. I actually stopped paying attention to their titles because for the most part my main source of damage was normal attacks and Otto's One-Two. I ended up quite often fighting troops with multiple 'boss' enemies, and at that point I just accepted my fate and quit the game to restart. The fact that each troop was made of 3 enemies each made each battle feel the same, it would have been nice to fight a single powerful monster every once in a while instead of knowing that I was likely to get 3 powerful monsters in a fight. If there were like 2-4 possible enemy types in the dungeon and a mix of 1-3 monsters it's likely that I could have learned tricks to defeat those types and also not die so often. But the fact there were so many types to keep track of made it hard to memorize things.

Item drops were another big issue for me; mainly that I didn't get them from every enemy! I can understand not getting coins from monsters, but my luck is bad so I often would barely survive a battle and then be rewarded with an empty rewards screen. When I did get something, it was just one or two items that would be worth at most 8 coins (subtracting the 2 I need to use to heal), so I couldn't afford to equip my party with better armor or weapons. RNG can be cruel, so please consider adjusting the drop rates so that players are sure to get something to make battles worthwhile.

During my run as the sailor the game crashed when I returned to town after finishing the Seaside Sentinel quest, there was a missing audio file: Audio/ME/Gameover15. It didn't happen during my mage run, so I don't know why it happened. But after that first quest I had played enough to get a good feel for the game, so I stopped.

I did run into a few bugs and errors, or at least odd happenings:

• For the Priest's line "Here, both of you breath onto my hands..." it should be 'breathe', not 'breath'
• Jacob's Turtle Stance skill says "25% chance for enemies to target Charles"
• The Player can use Souls as items in battle, which does nothing but wastes a turn...
• Odd effect, but your lighting effects appear above the message box, which means sometimes the faces get a weird glowing circle on them
• Had an issue with Otto's Breath Control, it only healed 2 AP instead of the listed 5 AP a couple of times