UNITY'S PROFILE

First off, I have to say that all of the custom animation, art, and resources for this game are really impressive. It really gives the game its own feel, and a lot of the game shows a high amount of polish. Very well done!

Some may find the music taken from other games to be a little bit off-putting, but it wasn't a serious negative for me. You've got the opening that's clearly doing a Super Metroid opening spoof, and there's plenty of Earthbound and Mario in there. While they fit the game, seeing as so much of this game is unique and made with custom resources, it almost seems like a less-recognizable soundtrack would make it stand out more. Just my opinion.

As for the tutorials, I agree with Marrend here. Everything before the Timed Hits tutorial is automatically assumed by anyone who's played any other VX Ace game. Perhaps put a choice in there asking "Do you need basic control information?" and if the player says no, skip to the Timed Hit tutorial? Or something similar?

I have to say that you're very good at giving the tutorials. They have a lot of visual aids and are very well done.

The text scroll honestly didn't bother me, since I've played plenty of games that do that for the old-school feel. Healing/Saving, however, got a bit tedious after a few times. You enter the shower, music plays and the screen flashes. Then you get three lines of text telling you that HP/SP has been restored but TP has been reduced, then you are asked if you want to save, then after you say "yes" and choose where to save, a new screen comes up with a random anime girl on it and a bar fills up. After that, you exit the shower and the character poses while the metroid music plays. That's cool the first time, but every time after that becomes tedious. If you could make healing/saving quicker, I think the game would flow better.

Now after you exit your house, you can get into battles. I like the way you do the touch-battles rather than the random ones, but I found some oddities. First, Adam's special move is costly, misses often, and if it hits, it doesn't do a significantly increased damage amount compared to a well-timed regular attack. Regular attacks never seem to miss, but then I spend SP and/or TP to do a special move and it misses more often than it hits. This is frustrating.

Also, the first enemies are pretty unforgiving. I could only fight one or two of them before I had to retreat back to the house and use the heal/save shower. Given that this is the very start of the game, I would suggest making them a little less deadly.

Also, I never found an item in my playing of several stages that revives fallen characters. Which means, if you lose someone, you have to make it out and back to a shower to revive them. Unless, maybe, I missed an item shop or something? I didn't encounter one in my playthrough (again, I went to the end of the garden platforming area).


I also found a weird difference in the way character faces look verses their in-battle drawings, especially Shannon here. Look at the two pictures of her here. They look almost like different characters, with different eye-colors and a different visual style.


You've got a very cool style with the art, and the menu-box graphics are really nice! From an artistic point of view, though, I find it a little jarring that the lines in the battle backgrounds are way thicker than the enemy characters. Personally, I'd recommend either drawing backgrounds with very thin lines, or drawing them with a dark grey instead of black so they don't overpower the enemy pictures.


While a lot of the dialog works nicely, there are also weird parts like this where the dialog doesn't seem natural. Trying saying the dialog out loud and seeing if it sounds like something that a person would actually say (I have to do this a lot myself, as I'm not great at dialog).


A platforming stage in an RPG! This was incredibly cool and well done! I have no idea how you were able to do this, but it is very very nice! My only complaint was the wall-jumping, which I found to be really hard to pull off.


I found this tutorial that Joe gives rather strange. I'm sure it's not the same on all playthroughs, but on mine, every time Joe uses his special move to try to demonstrate elemental weaknesses, he missed the opponent! And the dialog continues as if he had hit them.

Also, with the train you take between areas on the world map, it'd be useful if the streets you have to use are all put on the overworld map. I couldn't remember the name of the street with my house on it and spent extra money trying to get back there.

Okay, that's all I have so far. I must say, this is one of the most unique games I've played on the site, and it shows a lot of promise! You've obviously put a ton of work into this and it really shows! Great job! ^_^