Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• PRESENTATION
  

  Graphics all appear to be custom or asset packs. The mapping is maze-like but deliberately so, and while there are a few cases of mapping errors, overall the environments are quite nice. The battlers are especially nice.

  Sound is decent and bar here and there, not RTP which is refreshing - there's not much in the way of environmental sounds but what sounds are there are well used and fit. The music is notably good and fits the scenes it's used in very well.

  The writing is quite good - no errors that I could pick up on. The characterisation is very well done and the story is interesting and presented well.

  GAMEPLAY
  Gameplay consists mainly of walking around and battling. There's some puzzles here and there but they're pretty basic like flipping a switch to open a gate.

  The battles are the more interesting point of the game and the main draw - you have two characters who each have different stances that unlock different skills for use. Skills team up with each other to create extra effects, so there's a lot of care taken to explore those different effects and finding out which works best for which enemy.

  Items can be found after battle and they give a decent refill, too. The battles are balanced a bit to the hard side, though not incredibly so - you will find that you're at the lower end of the HP bar by the end of a battle most of the time.

  Sometimes you have choices to be made as to whether to flex your influence on the story or not - this changes what happens next.

  ENGAGEMENT
  The story and characters really helped to make this a compelling and interesting play. The battles enhance that quite a bit, being interesting and not overloading you with too many at once.

  THEME
  The theme focuses on there being more than one side to a story and how hard it is to judge a book by its cover when you do understand the other aspects - both the story itself and the mechanics really help to showcase this in that you have choices to make that can affect what happens, as well as how good intentions might not always work out for the best, with some choices backfiring.

  72/80
  

• 45/80 

  Actors look odd when doing certain actions. Extra save points when you can save from menu? Menu memory doesn't work properly for combat. Why is it that if a launch into air attack misses, the target is still launched? 

  Rarely, Q can fail even when following the instructions (it will still show the animation before the fight, but you don't get the battle bonus). Skills can fail depending on the order (makes no sense since the same fail reason doesn't always cause a failure of a skill). Ironically, 'Hilde must be alive' condition is ignored for Nyx's Eclipse. Nyx's Fire Support ignores enemy's defenders? If you skip through text fast enough, you can 'squash' the stranger, but he clips through.
  

  There are other odd bugs that may be difficult to reproduce due to their somewhat random nature.

  The story itself works, but relies on what is effectively a deus ex machina generator. That said, looking at one ending, the other ending could have gone completely differently. Several events could have gone differently and one ending it felt like a character broke their own beliefs due to rage instead of doing what they had been doing up to that point.

• Theme 

  Play as Shioh who challenged the goddess that she can stop all fighting and change the course of their Kingdom’s prophecy. It didn't end well.

  Gameplay 

  The game’s combat system is pretty in-depth. Each character has a mode/stances that changes their skills. Every time you switch modes, it takes focus away so there is a limit how much you can switch between stances. Character Synergy is great.

  Presentation

  Graphics need polish (especially Shioh) but the game is pretty polished. I haven’t hit a bug at all which is a lucky streak for this game developer.

  Engagement

  If the game is longer and had more time, they could explore the mechanics to its fullest. It has a lot of commercial quality and should there be a director’s cut, I think it would be pretty amazing to explore the party more.

  Total – 72/80

• This was an interesting story and pretty fun to play. I like how salty Shioh was with the goddess but I was a little disappointed at how the book-writing thing played out. I was hoping the concept would be worked more into the gameplay but it was mostly relegated to cutscenes (except for the battles, which as far as I can tell, there was no drawback to using the book to heal everyone). The battles were a lot of fun and the variety of modes and attacks makes you want to try them all out. The environments and character designs were also appealing. Well done.

  Score: 55/80