Gave it a shot last week with some friends. A few brief notes:
- The portraits’ art style is beautiful. It’s very distinctive and unique in a way that definitely adds to the vibe and identity of the project, and I’d say it’s the chapter’s strongest element. Marina is my favorite of them.
- All player units being cavalry while all enemy units are infantry is a cute touch
- I think I ended up aggroing too many enemies near the start or something, because a bunch of them started charging within the first few turns. It was tricky to advance for a few turns because people were moving in, so I was kinda stuck maneuvering around the starting position for a bit until I was able to actually start progressing. I ended up going to the right side and mostly ignoring the left.
- I appreciate that growths are not visible.
- The story is difficult to assess given the nature of the project. I felt like the intended goal of the chapter was to properly introduce the relevant characters without doing anything too narratively ambitious—and it does accomplish that pretty well! I’d say it does a good job painting an introductory picture of the cast in a relatively efficient amount of script time. But I also feel like not much really happened over the course of the chapter—I think the gameplay part didn’t really add much to the story outside of padding it out, and I feel like I would’ve taken away a similar story experience from watching a cutscene with a bunch of scripted battles.
- One story addition that I think might be a well-matching fit for fleshing out the crew and their vibe more would be a proximity quote system like in Grim Dragon, where little interactions play when you have certain units end turn close to each other.
- The music gives me the feeling that you like Do5/DoW, lol
- I may have lost my shit a bit at the ending
Good experience, looking forward to however you build on this with whatever you make next.