Hi. This was going to be a review, but I think this is more suited in a feedback section. I'd really like it if a developer replied, but it's not needed. Here are my points:
-- No tutorial
Unless you count one of the dialogs discussing the unique emotion-based conversation system (which I only saw one other time in the game after 30 minutes of play), there's no tutorial. Now, this being an RPG game, you'd think it wouldn't matter. But boy does it. It has mini-games that suddenly pop up with buttons and no explanation for how to play, except for maybe a few pieces of dialog or a list of controls, before you're shoved in to the mini game. The player is also never told that you use the twitter-like dialog to find what to do next, which lead me to exploring other areas of the game only to be bored.
-- Bad controls
The controls in this game are bad. Hit boxes are almost two times the size of an NPC, causing you to walk in to them and consequently talk to them. Most mini games have directional buttons to move the character, which would be better off using the keyboard, but thinking back there's diagonal buttons, which doesn't work with keyboard controls.
-- Bad UI
The in game UI is composed of pretty much 3 buttons at the bottom. A link to a map that doesn't clearly distinct where you can and can't go, unless you mouse over the entire picture to get a mental idea, an options dialog, and a twitter-like dialog that lacks a clear mechanism to close it. When you're talking with somebody, you have to click on an arrow to move the conversation along, which is tedious as opposed to pressing enter. When you go to load a save, you have to enter its name instead of having a listing of them. Which is kind of silly.
-- Punishes exploration
The game's rooms are non-interactive, yet scattered with things that give you the impression that they would be. Doors are a good example of this. At some point in the game the teacher asks you to sit at the front row, but you can't. You instead have to talk to Pat and have the teacher start talking in the middle of a conversation.
There's also a large amount of characters who do nothing at all besides say one thing. At some point in the game I went to the market and walked around it all, talking to people, and nothing at all anybody said mattered.
-- Awful minigames
While the idea of turn-based soccer is nice, it had clunky controls and dragged on for too long. In it you have the ability to taunt, which gives you a list of names of who to taunt, without informing the player of who is who unless for some reason you memorized them before you played, or glanced at the top right list of players (is it a ranking? who knows) that vanishes when you're at the screen to select who to taunt to.
The cheating mini game is confusing considering you stop controlling the main character (who's standing at the opposite end of the room), and start controlling a green square, with other unpredictable squares moving to spaces which you can't predict. Better yet, there's not mention of how you have a delay between going to squares, so you think you're in the clear, but you're not.
The brawl mini game is okay as far as I remember.
-- Music
The music in the game is very repetitive and lacks transition. Not nice.
-- Zero-day bug / Story
Playing the game, I somehow am in a loop. I've read somewhere that this is a bug, but it's a very fatal bug considering the twitter dialog leads me to it. I repeat the same few days over and over, one of the characters even notes it, so I'm not sure if this is to do with the story. If it is, I really like it, it's kind of like groundhog day, but even that has an end. One that I couldn't find. If that is in fact the story, and the music being repetitive nods to that, then I guess it's okay. If it's not and I'm just reading in to some weird game bug, can you fix it?
-- Possible fixes
- Click on people to talk to them or reduce the hit box size.
- De-saturate most the map that you can't go to, or some other distinction.
- Maybe have an update system on the twitter-like dialog icon? That way you'd find out where you need to go easier.
- Tutorials (or even example videos!)
- Use icons of characters you want to taunt in the soccer game.
- Be able to run (some rooms are big)
- Use keyboard for soccer/cheating mini-game, if possible.
- Have room doors that you start at go back to the map screen.
