CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Well, the idea behind EU is only as relevant as how well EU actually sticks to that idea.

Anyway, the EU voting are far more complicated than national voting. What happens in the EU parliament is far more distanced from the average person than what happens in one's own country. Most of us also don't know what questions EU does and doesn't handle.

The fog absolutely cannot be updated while the player is moving. The player has to stand on the dead center of a tile while the fog is updating, otherwise the fog will be out of alignment.

Anyway, this really should have been a script instead of events. I understand that there probably aren't any such scripts, but the event system isn't designed for this. I don't think this idea will work out with events.

author=Desertopa
I think the former could work out; there are definitely authors out there who're experts of the "write by the seat of your pants" style. But in general, I think that the twist which is planned in advance, where the author has in mind the idea of a character who is the sort of person who would sympathize with the villain, and incorporates that into their characterization from the beginning and works in the appropriate foreshadowing, will tend to work out better than the one which the author doesn't have in mind until shortly before it happens.

If you sketch out your storyline and at some point goes "hey, it would be cool if plot twist X happens" then you can go back to earlier parts of the storyline and make the appropriate foreshadowing. Also, if twist X requires a character to have a certain personality, chance is that character already have that personality. Typically, you would not look at a character you've made up and think "hey, what if that character betrayed the party?" unless there's already something about the character that makes the betrayal makes sense. If you get such an idea, your head has already figured out a way it fits.

I think I give you an example. One character I thought off is a girl who on the surface acts pretty much how strict religious people want girls to act, but in reality she's in no way that proper and for example gets drunk not very rarely. Once I had that concept down, I got the idea for a plot twist where a villain accidentally reveals himself due to her putting out a false exterior. Without going too much into detail, the villain basically claimed a supernatural mean of sensing pure hearted people and when he then "sensed" her, it was a dead giveaway. This twist was not an idea I had in the beginning, it wasn't until I looked closer at how to make her concept more interesting that I got the idea. There also already happened to be a good reason as to why the villain want to gather people that are seen as pure hearted, so the twist fits. If that hadn't been the case, then I wouldn't have thought the twist was a good idea.

Anyway, going back to the betrayal twist, imagine deciding that a character is going to betray the party before you've gotten the inspiration for a character for whom that kind of plot twist fits. Now you need to write one. Unless you're rather skilled, there's a high chance that the characterization ends up coming of as stiff. Further, it's likely the player will notice that the character is written for exactly that purpose.

I've played this a bit and so far both the battle system and the writing has been great. I haven't dived too much into character customization yet though.

Edit: I've beaten the game. Overall, it was great.

The characters are really fun and well characterized. It was also nice to have a married couple as party members. I can not think of any advice to give you here.

The skill set-up is also great. All characters had customizable roles (Isaac being the least flexible though) and contributed to the party in interesting ways. Most of their skills also remained intact after I customized their stats towards specific goals.

Combat actually required some thought and there was also a lot you could do to speed it up with some further thinking. This also happened without breaking the skill-set of the characters. I did not enter the scenario where I only had to think about damage output. I wonder if that holds up in a future playtrough though.

So, what could have been even better? I can think of one thing in particular. The enemy variety felt rather low. I looked a lot upon the situation I was facing, but I rarely paid attention to the actual enemy lineup. The only exception was when I faced one enemy with very high defense and low HP, then I would build up Overkill on the other enemy and use it to bring the former one down. Other than that, it didn't seem to matter whether the enemies were bats or skeletons or whatever. Eventually I encountered the "been there, done that" situation. I must however note that this happened much later in this game than usual.

author=RyaReisender

I'd estimate that many (if not most) players are looking for challenge

Not so many in JRPG communities, because there are plenty who:
1. Play them for the story.
2. Want to bash the buttons without much thinking and see numbers go higher.

I suspect that this is a consequence of RPGs usually having brainless combat thus weeding out people who demand tactics. People have mostly given up on the idea of combat actually requiring thought. I know that even though I would like more thoughtful combat, I get suspicious whenever a game creator claim that his/her game actually requires tactics. Usually, my suspicions are very well founded.

What this means is that even if you manage to make an RPG who's combat requires thought, chance is people won't believe it. Watch them tell you that RPGs shouldn't require grinding. However, if you do convince people this is actually the case unlike the other 95+% of all other game creators who make the same claim, then you should have a sizable audience available.