vid: 

as far as personal taste,  the dialogue seemed to take a long ass time and nothing really went anywhere but I really liked how the portraits danced and interacted with each other in cutscenes but overall I just couldn't bring myself to really feel the story or dialogue, nothing was happening just lots of info dumping and stuff at least it seemed to me, but the overall story itself does seem interesting, just not in a moment-to-moment way 

combat seems... er... idk; like there's a lot going on but not a lot of stuff happening also; I don't like not being able to see enemy health bars until i'm targeting them too. I personally would've liked an autobattle or some kind of auto system for this and also an automatic smart-equip system lol I am really lazy but I feel like its becoming more and more common these days for turn based RPGs to include streamlining stuff like this, just my opinion but also there's market evidence too, not sure if you wanna go that whole distance

I ran into some bugs

- "Defend" shows W instead of S

- Can't go back into safe room once you've explored it once (not sure if intended, door showed "open" interaction on it still

- Camera got "stuck" on a target-enemy-action (the little zoom in that plays when you're targeting an enemy) 

- really weird map/movement interaction @ around 40:00, move directions seemed to get disjointed or something while opening map but it fixed itself luckily 

The game looks very impressive and I'd really like to get into it but I ran into a lot of issues.

The most important one is that the screen elements are all messed up. Some of them don't cover the whole screen and it makes the game look very weird. It's most visible in the first person view here. I tried alt + enter but nothing happened and I couldn't find any options menus.

I really don't like how it starts with a massive chunk of dialogue. There's no menu or anything even. I understand that it's supposed to be a story driven game but you have to give players some gameplay to get them interested in the game first. No one is going to read that much dialogue in a game they don't know, especially not in a game jam. And it didn't seem like that important dialogue even, I read most of it and nothing really happened that couldn't be explained with just a few lines. It's also hard to skim through it with fast forward because it distorts the screen and makes it really hard to follow. Leave all the minor character interactions and other fluff for later. I also wasn't a big fan of the sound effect that plays when text shows up but that's more of a subjective thing. I think the other things I mentioned will resonate with a lot of people.

The combat controls also feel a bit weird. I'm used to selecting actions with the arrows or wasd so this feels unnatural. But if you want to have hotkeys for it, at least make it so you press the hotkey once and not once to select and then having to confirm.

Sorry for sounding so negative but it looks and sounds amazing so I expect all the minor things to be on par with the visuals too. And I love dungeon crawlers so I'd really want to give it a proper go once the visual bugs are fixed.

The visuals, sound, presentation is top notch. What I saw of the story felt like it dragged, but I mostly FF and skipped it. The setting is a little tropey but I can see it work.

I was devastated when the combat didn't work. also the controls seem very inconsistent. either you should nav everything with directions and accept/back or be able to click things in the ui to invoke it.

Maybe it technically was working, but I couldn't understand any of it.

Good looking game, very stylish. I'm interested to see how it develops, despite the anime.

Moving the portraits around during dialogue is clever. I only encountered an issue during this part.

Aside from that, I think the combat might get tiresome if the game is combat heavy, but it might be too early to tell since there's only one fight.

The dungeon wandering is excellent, but the controls feel incongruent with the dialogue sections. As in, you'd expect your advance dialogue button to be your confirm or context sensitive interaction button but space brings up the map instead. Cool map though.

Keep up the good work.

I think alt+enter to toggle fullscreen, and to center it within a 16:9 central region regardless of the window / fullscreen aspect ratio, and to rescale for the needed height, is the better way. I have a kind of example you could use  

I dont mind the piano. I think it would be a nice feature if you press enter a second time while it saying the text, that it should finish the text animation instantly.

Extremely good art and presentation. Using music for the dialogue noise filler stuff is really creative, though I don't really like the layered piano that Rowan uses. 

On my screen, the UI is not fit properly. Dialogue text boxes and characters display fine, but basically every other screen is smaller than the full screen size. Story sections are flush to the top left, and the gameplay/battle parts are centered on the screen. 

With regards to the combat, the main issue is just a lack of information. I feel like the -> Stats should just be open by default because there's rarely a time when I'd rather stare at the enemy portraits than see what my selected skills actually do. Orders don't explain what they do at all, and I can't tell the difference it makes so early on. I'm sure this could be helped with a handholdy tutorial to show you where everything is once. 

For exploration, I'm just not really sure where my hands should be. WASD is the main movement, but I have to use Enter to interact, and the mouse can look around a little bit, and arrow keys do nothing. Mouse clicks should probably also be usable for interaction? I think this issue shows in some of the other modes too, just having too much split between both WASD and arrow keys in ways that don't seem consistent or apparent. (Also, how does controller work with this?)

Story: I just wish there was a click to finish line instead of it going straight to fast-forwarding the whole thing. The opening does drag on a little bit, could probably still be trimmed down some more, but it should feel a lot better if lines can be finished immediately on click. 

-The game is hard to control and to understand, I need a tuto asap or at least an help button.

- Skip button should be faster to push

- I think the button to press should be more visible (like the W to attack is hard to make from the icon)

Otherwise the art and presentation is impressive, this is the best looking game of agdg. Congrat, you're gmi

Typing these out as I play so I don't forget.

> Mixed on the controls. WASD are mapped to the battle actions like attack/skill, and you can use them to select skills and view their descriptions, but not selecting targets. I gotta do finger gymnastics to do this game

> Seems like if you commit into an attack while the game is mid-zoom (from the target select?) The combat scene would be stuck in that level of zoom.

> Combat could benefit from being a tad faster. A button that you can mash to skip the ceremony of each skill's half a second windup would be good. This is probably something you should work on early before it becomes a pain in the ass to do and people WILL ask for this.

> You should play the Etrian Odyssey HD remasters on PC for a bit tbh. Copy that game's feel, especially since you're inspired by PQ

> plz let me use esc to exit menus or X. I'm sure a lot of people are used to arrow keys + ZXC controls so that could also be a consideration

> the items you can loot in the world seem to be invisible? Not sure if intentional since you mentioned chests in which I can't find them