I have played til the point Epoch managed to escape from Richard´s castle and he got this "weird" dream (about the past i think?). In majority, it seems to be a marvelous game. The idea of the story has been worked out very detailed until that point and the profound mystery about Marcellus makes you really wanna know who he really is and what his point of collecting all crystals could be.
You did a good job in setting up some emotional parts for directing the players anger throughout the game. In some cases, when the player has to kill some (i call them random) NPC, normally there is no guilty conscience for him about killing them.
But in this game, some of this NPC got a personality for this reason. In some cases, you can hear a short conversation about two guardians and you can find out their names, or that they have a wife and children and if you see them die you really get this feeling of:" damn, those poor children lost their father" as the player, directing your anger directly to the person who murdered the guardian.
This is a really good idea to build up a good atmosphere and besides it suits this game in a specific way very good.
But there are some things i do not like and mainly they are related to the visual part of the game. In fact, i don´t really like the mapping. There are many mistakes in the areal design eg the ruins Alex and his group explore. If i follow the eastern or the western part to the top i cannot pass the two towers there to the left or the right but thats a mistake, because from the visual aspect, the towers are just very high and do not block my path. The only thing which blocks my path is the basement of the ruins.
In the sewer you should maybe remove these blocked paths from one of these platforms to the next, because at first i wondered why i cannot pass them until i finally (after 10 minutes or so .-.) i became aware of this "paths" beeing walls...
Imo they failed the 3D aspect they maybe should had have and besides they don´t make sense after all i think.
Next there is the vanish of the npc when i have beaten them. They don´t die or fall to the ground or sth like that, they just disappear. And i found that sort of funny at some points. Unfortunately at some spots where it should not be funny. Some of the bg and sound effects are annoying, eg the bgm at the castle for the first time beeing there (if you spend more than 5 minutes to explore the areal it really gets a pain in the ass!) and some of the sound effects like that rock sound when the gate keeper in the cave appears is an rtp sound that does not suit.
That you use bgm from Noebu Oematsu etc is not the problem, but many of the bgm you use are well known from the final fantasy games and i think they steal some personality of your game because at the locations where you recognize the bgm from ff i feel kinda, yeah... harmed.^^
So i would like some more extraordinary bgm.
I think that´s all i´ve got for now.
rgds
Innoxious
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