MV - Titans of Illumia (15+hrs Non-Linear RPG)

@Byrne,
This is the first time I've heard of an issue of lag at all. Are you using Rpg maker MV also?
I'll try to spend some time working out what might be causing the lag, sorry to hear you've had trouble getting it to run.

Hey, so I did the prologue because I wanted the mirror and also the shovel....but I do not see this expedition tent? Could you tell me where it is please D:

@kaiijuu,
If you go the southern edge of the map where the hermit is then follow the coastline to the right you should come across it. The shovel is only available post prologue along with the other tools if that's what you mean.
Hope that helps.

I hate to be *that* guy, but with your walkthrough, do you intend of expanding it a little? I really do enjoy playing your game but I ragequit a lot.(extremely unbalanced battles, for one) I feel like, even though it's described as "non-linear" it's not really? Like, to get to certain areas you still need equipment(like, the lantern or the ocarina) and it seems like to advance to other towns, you have to have tools that you don't have easy access to? Does that make sense?

Good game, unfortunately I've run into a game breaking bug. I can not enter the sky castle dungeon a second time. The first time I died shortly after entering, after respawning I tried to return through the airship, but I reach the event map blocked off by soldiers, and if I interact with the green control orb it teleports me inside a rock in a room with a grey equipment chest.

My guess is if I had flown the airship back it would have triggered another event which I missed by exiting through death.

@kaiijuu,
Honestly feel free to be *that* guy, if I don't know what people dislike then I'll be less clued in on what to fix. I agree with a lot of what you've said and I certainly agree about the lack of balancing. The only problem is I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to balance the game as a whole without compromising what I'm trying to achieve with gear providing stats and options.
I'll always try to crack down on enemies that are cheap but from what I hear there aren't that many complaints about specific encounters and I can only assume it's a general issue with most encounters. Could you let me know a bit more about what problems you're having with enemies even on a general level?
I believe the tools are a big problem that affect linearity so I may need to scale back which areas they unlock or rethink the idea. The game will never be completely non-linear but I'd like to have enough non-linear elements so that people don't feel mislead. The idea in practice was that I wanted to mirror the original Zelda in that you can attempt the main dungeons in any order but the difficult ones will still give the player a harder time. The only town and main dungeon that's blocked off is Masindria and then you only need either the shovel or pickaxe. This doesn't actually need to be this way though and it's a bit of a convoluted route to get there anyway so I'll make that area a bit easier to get around.
The tools are intended to unlock hidden areas but again I may have to rethink the idea or limit it to just unlock certain treasure rooms for hard to come by loot.
I do also intend to keep adding to the walkthrough.

@Braydon_M,
Ah I believe you've just found a sequence break. I've located the issue and it'll be fixed next update. If you talk to the green haired girl (Sydney) before going in the top-right hand building again you shouldn't have any issues and should be able to resume from where you were.

It might be easier for me to PM you! Like I said, I really really do enjoy this game. I'm probably in the minority of gamers that like a challenge, but not a challenge that seems like, hard af. (not that this game is, upon my earlier comment I did beat the water temple)

Sydney has disappeared too, so I guess I'll just wait for the update.

Just a quickie update with some minor fixes (v1.0.14).

So I decided to try firing up the game again and it's working like normal now, I have no idea what the deal was before.

But anyway I finished the Prologue and have begun exploring around after deciding not to do the water dungeon yet. The game is great! The main "problem" I'd say I have is that I don't feel much incentive to do the encounters given the lack of an XP system. I understand why you did it though, as a truly non-linear game otherwise would have been basically impossible. There are some enemy-scaling type plugins out there now but I don't think I've ever seen such a big project using them, so I have no idea how the balance ends up working late-game with those.

As a result I generally tend to avoid a lot of the encounters. Your combat is quite good and the balance seems tight to me, I think a lot of the complaining is perhaps a matter of player skill. There's a lot of options here and it feels rewarding to succeed in a battle. On two of the Prologue bosses, in fact, I restarted the game mid-fight because I knew I could go back and use a better strategy to more quickly and efficiently win the battle. Saved me a lot of items and demonstrated the strength of maximizing your turns.

Can't wait to dive in deeper. I love when games give me unlockable classes. It would be nice if there was a list of how many of them there are and a general idea of where to look. I want to collect all of them!

Edit: Another quick thing that kind of bothers me: the position of options in your menus. I believe the options that you will be picking the most often should be near the top. Now, the Quest Menu is important of course. But how much more often are you going to be going to the equipment tab? Every time I adjust my equipment I have to hit the down arrow 4 times, and it just kind of adds up in needless annoyance. Achievements is even especially pointless in having so high up in the menu. That should be near the bottom, below options. There are many ways to change the order of options in the menu, look into a plugin for it!

Additionally in battle I think the Skill option should be above the Contract option. Most of the time my characters stay on the same contract, so I don't want to scroll through that every time I'm trying to use a Skill (aka nearly every turn).

These are small things but they would really help with the game's polish, I think.

So, I have finished your game today and it was great and worth to try. I just found some few bugs but everything is fine!

A short review from me :
- The story was great compare to any other RPG game, especially four Titans that you were created!
- The system somehow is good but if there are any "Level System" it would be awesome!
- "What is important it "100 % FREE". LOL

9/10 for me

Whatever, I can't able to archive all of achievement but I do found Darkholme Haha!
Anyway this is my first game on a kind of mini-RPG game created by RPGMaker. And it was Impressed!

THANK YOU FOR MAKING SUCH A GREAT GAME!

ok either my strategies are awful, I'm missing some equipment, or the flaming titan is op. seriously i have several flame magic reducers on most of my party and he still tends to hit for 300-400 damage multiple times. combine that with the dragon using the same multi hit fire spell and the way this titan is apparently immune to stat downs and we have an issue. last try i was planning to do mag def buffs on my party first turn...... they killed my guardian before they got their first turn. this is kinda crazy, i know they were meant to be the hardest of the four elemental dungeons but at this point I would really love to know where the dark mirror is. I can't beat the spellsword hero either but i figured they were just too strong as an optional boss and I'd get stronger eventually, i also searched his dungeon pretty thoroughly twice and even tried losing a fight or two and still can't find the mirror. third time is the charm i guess, i finally found it.... I wonder if refighting the titans gets more than 25 shards ;p

I finally figured out why the fire titan is so op, he gets more attacks per turn if you kill his allies. which make knights useless unless you can deal with him having 3 attacks a turn. seriously, someone nerf the flamer a bit, if he is gonna get more attacks as his allies fall reduce his intelligence to that of the dragon, either that or cap him at two attacks per turn. His meteor is for all reasonable purposes, impossible to survive, and if he gets more moves a turn he may manage to take out 3 chars in one turn single handedly making a comeback near impossible, hence the two move a turn limit.

Hey leonideus, you're right about the damage output for that boss, it's more than a bit nuts to put it lightly. It's nearly been a year since the game was released so I plan on going back in with a fresh perspective and hopefully polish things off a bit. It may well be difficult for a file that has
cleared several titans to beat the fire dungeon let alone a new party but balance wise I'll have to tweak things so that it isn't impossible for a new file to grind away at the boss. Unfortunately with the CTB system speed really is the best weapon, if you can balance speed gear with anti fire gear you stand a better chance.
It is the most challenging area of the main four if I recall correctly so it may be more fun to explore the world and get some OP gear first. There'll likely be a wait before it gets fixed but if there's any other feedback you have I'll take it under advisement for the next update in November.
-HD

I have one or two, make stat boosting stones drop rarely when breaking rocks or digging up holes. If these provide some of the stat boosts from the dark mirror it will reduce the chance of people needing to grind there, it would also provide more rewards for participating in things besides fighting, I recommend you do this instead of, or in addition to having the mana stars and hp party items being found at certain rocks which a player may never discover. i would say make them roughly a tenth as common as the elemental stones. This would encourage more exploration for strength gains, The fire guy is a little easier once you've read through the walkthrough and learned to cancel out his magic buffs but still quite powerful to where i had to grind with my equipment, since he is known as the strongest a steady level up from exploration rather than equipment seems like it would help more if you go to other dungeons first as equipment alone is a bit to weak, I would also suggest no enemy in an elemental dungeon should be immune or resistant to all elements though they don't all have to be the element of that dungeon I would recomend not using the dungeons element itself as their weakness. ex. don't use fire as a weakness in the volcano but air and earth would be fair game for small fry. This could make the elemental system deeper and more useful in normal battles. I recomend not using light and dark as sole weaknesses though until at least past the first 4 elemental dungeons. I'm currently stuck on the elves forest as i think i need an ocarina to get in but the ocarina is inside.... Probably missing something here. I'm looking for the mentioned spirits but having fairly little luck, also, if i use one of the contract items from beating bosses can it be reassigned later? atm i'm kinda scared tyo use them in fear i might choose poorly and be stuck. If it isn't already possible it might be a good addition to let you change who uses a contract from the item menu or make them equipable in another couple slots under the equip menu.

I am interested in playing your RPG. I will download and try it out.

Ok I have a good suggestion this time, weapon switching in battle, One weapon is bound to be ineffective against some enemies in a given group, and this can lead to brutally long battles which become nigh impossible when the enemy pulls out a heal right before it dies. Long story short switching weapons in battle would help make high level fights more fun. You may wish to have it use a turn but i honestly believe that in later battles it would easily be worth it. Armor should stay as it is since changing it during a fight would be completely unrealistic but getting a new weapon from your pack isn't too rough. It is also note worthy since different weapons and amors fit different classes more and as such the switching can become troublesome as far as drawing out the full power of each class.

So I'm at the dwarven mine to try to find the pickaxe. It said I can find it through the minecart puzzle but I'm seeing no minecart at all. Is it supposed to be there or not? I want to play more since the game is pretty great but right now I'm stuck.

So, this game obviously had a lot of effort put into it, but it has a lot of serious flaws.

Basically, it's an open world RPG where you have a party of 4 specific characters. Except, it starts very linearly. At the start of the game, you play through the linear "personal stories" of each of the 4 party members. The only one that seems to have some freedom to explore is the Mage and even that is only limited to a few areas at the southeastern part of the island. It takes about an hour to get to the actual "sandbox" part of the game.

The worst part is, their personal stories all end in the same way. They all go through the same exact dungeon at the very end of their "personal storyline" and there don't seem to be any changes, just the same exact dungeon four times in a row. While it might make sense that the dungeon remains the same, it's terrible gameplay-wise. I almost quit the game once I realized I have to do it fourth time in a row with a different character. Not a good start to what is supposed to be a Sandbox RPG.

Anyway, after you finish the four personal stories, the sandbox part starts. You are also told that you should go to the castle to confront the villain and that the only way inside is through the Sewers. Well, I've searched the whole Sewer area and didn't manage to find a way to the castle, so who knows how to get there.

Then you find out that there's no XP. The only way to upgrade your characters seems to be by buying or crafting better equipment. The problem with that is that the main city doesn't seem to have any good equipment there and the crafting recipes I was able to find weren't much better. So, this whole progression system really needed more explanation.

In addition, you lose your gold when you die, you can only save in the city and the dungeons are long... that means that you can easily lose the last hour of game time with nothing to show for it and unless they are heavily invested in the game, that will only cause them to stop playing.

Here's a few other random events from my playthrough that soured my opinion of this game:

1) One NPC said that dwarves are great craftsmen, so I decided to go to the dwarf city, hoping that there's some good equipment there. I got there, then got a cutscene where the party was captured, interrogated, then let go, but I couldn't really do much in that city afterwards and everything past it was way too strong to deal with and there weren't any new items available there, so that was a dead end.

2) At one point, I found a Bandit Dungeon that I cleared out, hoping for some good loot, only to find that the path deeper to their base is blocked by one NPC bandit. Who just says "I won't allow you deeper into our base!" and that's all, you can't fight him, he just blocks the way. How does that make sense in what's supposed to be a sandbox RPG?

3) After said Bandit Dungeon letdown, I went back to the starting city and found a sidequest. One NPC hears strange noises from their cellar and asks us to investigate. So we do. We go to the cellar, then to the dark tunnels underneath, find out there's some shadow skeleton enemies on the map that are almost impossible to avoid, get into a fight with one of them... only to be annihilated in one turn, because they have 10 times more HP than our whole party put together and the damage to match that.

I'm aware that this is an old game and by now you've moved on to much better things, but I really wanted to write up my thoughts on this game anyway after all of that. It's filled with beginner mistakes that people should learn from, but it definitely had a lot of work put into it and I can see how it could be great if it were more forgiving.

I did like a lot of things about this game and it had an intriguing premise, just the bad things about it soured the experience too much.