ACRA'S PROFILE

In regards to trying to stop players from overusing their best units, consider some kind of fatigue mechanic.

The longer they fight, they start to suffer steady, continual stat decreases; this'll typically result in them temporarily becoming among the weaker of your units, and all the more reason to pull them back. This could even be a suitable penalty instead of permadeath; a 'killed' character is stuck with crippling stat penalties for several levels until they recover from the wounds. Or alternatively, they simply suffer a permanent stat penalty.

Fatigue should probably somewhat tied to a character's class; the massive lumbering armour isn't doing anyone any good if they stop being an effective wall after being plunked with a couple dozen arrows or dinky swords, and it would make sense if the assassin would tire quickly if he's cornered into continual combat instead of the one-hit, one-kill, sneak-into-shadows stuff he's used to.

This could even tie into your Kamikaze thing. Using a skill wouldn't wipe your unit off the map, but exhaust them massively, leaving them not dead, but effectively crippled. These don't even have to be wholly offensive; even something like the ability to move after attacking or temporarily boosting a stat for a bit to suffer a greater penalty a turn or two later could work.

@LockeZ - I’m just so... tired. Not everyone is obsessed with criticizing and belittling like you are, and I find your fascination with it outright disturbing. It’s an endless, inescapable struggle against a force that refuses to listen or understand. I just want to find a place where I can work in peace, knowing that this spectre isn’t hanging over me, let alone actively encouraged. Alas, that will never happen. I really didn’t want to post in the first place, but I felt morally obligated to. Having to show that this isn’t the nice, egalitarian little community some of you think it is.

@KingArthur

author=Mr_Detective

author=Trolololol
I’ve personally received a sickening amount of death and rape threats for the extremely few times I’ve surfaced here (My personal favourite is ‘how often did you have to suck kentona’s cock to get that piece of shit on the front page’).

I checked your profile, and I believe this has got to be a joke... :-?

Note who he quotes it as from. Really, he's not calling me a liar? He's calling me far worse than that, actually.

Enjoy being attacked?

author=harmonic
people love being offended, so they seek it out. It gives you righteous indignation, which feels good. It also gives you sympathy and support system. There's like no downside to it.

The other two are a bit more broad. I've taken a fair bit of offense to your own 'programming is sooo easy to learn' quips for starters, and Sailerius and harmonic have said some extremely broad and hurtful things.

I’ve personally received a sickening amount of death and rape threats for the extremely few times I’ve surfaced here (My personal favourite is ‘how often did you have to suck kentona’s cock to get that piece of shit on the front page’). Although you could argue some of those events were sparked by other factors, and the threats were just a convenient touchstone. Which still doesn’t exactly help matters any. I’m sure it must be a daily occurrence for some other female members.

This is a bit tangential from the real topic (women within the industry), and I know nothing good will come of it, but, whatever. I typed it up and don’t feel like deleting it. This community isn’t exactly stellar when it comes to decent female characters and subtle sexism. The recent banners for Rainbow Nightmare and Love and War are both pretty much impossible to miss and seem to solely scream ‘tiiiiiittts’, and let’s just say that numerous of the Pics of the Moment tend to have a similar focus. I’ve seen multiple game profiles here based wholly around beating women and just blatantly being as misogynistic as possible. NicoB manages to call pretty much every single female character in every single RM game he plays a ‘dirty whore’. It’s supposed to be a joke, but the very fact he does it at all is quite indicative. I’m not saying that all of this is actively offensive, but it’s all these little niggling things that are absolutely everywhere. And I find that these things kind of discredit these characters and their creators.

And let me just say that it’s ridiculous trying to say that negative male stereotypes somehow justifies or negates what happens to women.

While I've not played either, I've seen both the RPG Screenshot play of Matsumori Days and Nessiah's Try of this (haven't heard the podcast, though), and between the two, I think I can tell you what your greatest problem is; there's no real sense of direction or purpose. Or at least not early on. There's no reason to care about the characters or the 'story', whatever it even is.

Both have pretty much the exact same setting and scenario of 'piss around high school for half the time, spend the other half in some poorly explained dreamworld'. I suspect the Persona series heavily influenced this. While it's not a trope I'm fond of, I think your execution of it is particularly poor. It flip-flops between the two much too quickly. You're not really given a reason to care about the otherworld. It's just 'bam, you're an elf now and fighting random monsters'. The school portion amounts to wandering around a couple of 'pointless' boards filled with NPCs that don't really contribute to anything.

The characters had quirks, but didn't seem particularly memorable at all. I think a part of that is the names, and another part is them looking a bit too similar, but probably the most central problem is that they're not introduced very well. It probably has a lot to do with them all being introduced at the same time and being reduced to two or three lines. On the other hand, several (probably all, given enough time) of them were with you for otherworld sections, so that gave you a little more time to get acquainted with them. Except they turned into monsters and stuff. So, yeah, great, that just made keeping them straight even harder.

Basically, yeah, a slower and more deliberate pace would probably improve clarity. Make the school segments better introduce the characters (also possibly don't limit it to just the school). Make each of the otherworld segments longer and have some clearly defined reason, purpose, and make them clearly linked. From what I saw, they seemed like completely random sections with no connection to each other besides 'I'm an elf now'. Again, I only saw a couple of videos that only covered the first part, so I might be jumping the gun with some of these generalizations. But the first impression counts, no?

As for what you actually wrote in this blog; Ruri is kind of annoying and nosy, and it's exacerbated by the fact everyone else is kind of a jerk. Boards are boards. As long as they serve a purpose and don't look absolutely horrid, I wouldn't worry too much. As for the opening and introducing everyone, some of the problem was that the opening was really awkwardly written, and there wasn't too much about anyone. Perhaps, I dunno, start out with Ruri meeting someone before school starts. That at least gets one person a little more defined. Possibly make them somewhat grouped, too. I find it's easier to remember people as groups and their relations to each other. I guess that was sort of going on with 'mean guy' and 'some girl I can't even remember anything about'. Characters were clearly supposed to be the strong-point here; if they aren't clearly established and distinct, you pretty much have nothing at all.