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review time
overall, pretty good
fundamentals are there, decent level design (maybe a little bit on the large end for how many repels you can afford), QOL is decent but i think should be made a little more obvious to the player. sidequest design is also fine. hook is decent, i like the idea of a pokemon fangame that seems set up to be almost like a fairy tale in a very explicit fantasy setting, or as i said, it's interesting. hope pokemon is integrated in a good way
also, story and characters are something i'm surprisingly more positive on this time. it's obviously way too early to tell, and i was having a bit of an issue with the names especially during the castle part, but, so far, this does seem to be a setting with actual thought put into it
i'm just hoping that it doesn't end up that the kingdom is revealed to be this generic evil entity you need to topple and there's a bit more nuance to it than that, as it's actually one of the more interesting ideas for a 'villain' in one of these games recently
and music was okay, obviously most octopath, if you're going to take from something, might as well be actually good.
biggest issues so far are
- stealth section at the very start. please don't do this, it does not belong in pokemon, at all, ever
- fight design quality is...definitely dicey. it's somewhat forgivable now, but the normal gym leader feels very, very unbalanced with basically just being 'set up or you fucking die to echoed voice spam'. also, before that, carbink with dazzling gleam and lokix before you have access to the audino trainer. it's not as ridiculously unbalanced and moronic as how a kaizoshart mod handles early game fights, but it's definitely a severe spike in difficulty from anything else so far, even the post gym 1 sidequests. probably should tone it down quite a bit and then make later fights harder to make for a smoother difficulty curve
give this a good first effort/10, hope this gets a team and gets off the ground as it is promising
