Sword & Squire

The whole idea of controlling one party member while reining in the other is so cool...I dig the resource management focus. On my first run I made it to the boss but ended up having to restart my run so I could have like, enough potions or MP for like one more heal, because I ended up buying more dispel herbs than I ended up needing lol. Looking forward to giving it another shot soon! (I played on the "confident enough" difficulty.) The original music is awesome too

hi this was turbo cool! i loved the way the combat logic here matches the party dynamic mia and darconius have in the story. also the custom music?? top notch, this entry really stands out and i had a great time with it!

Played on the hardest difficulty and was on the edge of my seat the whole tower. Won by the skin of my teeth. Pristinely balanced, gorgeous presentation. One of my favorite entries.

Hey, this was great! I love the idea of a perma-berserk party member. Paper Mario 64 has an unused badge that makes Mario berserk and increases his attack, and playing a randomizer that adds it back in is a lot of fun. UFO 50's RPG, Grimstone, also has a functionally Berserk party member in the form of a dog.

As others have said, the type triangle is a fun spin on the usual formula. I will say, in my personal run through, Formless was the clear winner, simply because 90% of the post-floor 1 fights were all evildewers. I only ran into a solid enemy a single time in the form of the golems, which beat me up enough that I wound up resetting anyway. It is possible to get some pretty rotten luck if you run into the three evildewer troop and they all decide to bubble Mr. Solid. I greatly appreciated the save points, which balanced out the high encounter rate. I actually managed to get through the entire tower without using my items, which was good, because they were pretty essential in the final fight.

This is a real nice and tight experience. I particularly like the solid > formless > fluent triangle. Even though it is functionally identical to traditional rock-paper-scissors combat formulas, the change in flavor gives new life to each new encounter. The fresh take on elemental weakness is a great way to innovate within the harsh design restrictions that come within RPGmaker. I found each novel encounter to be an interesting puzzle to figure out- and the game is short enough to where the novelty did not overstay its welcome. 

Also props to having a fair degree of flexibility within such a short rpg. I went against the final boss using the squire as my main source of damage against the final boss using the fluent whip + golden bagel on her. It made for a thrilling fight.  

One of my favourite combat-focused entries. The highest difficulty felt very tightly tuned towards forcing me to fight in suboptimal conditions and use items to keep things from getting even worse. I ended up using a strategy that was heavy on Toxic Bombs, but I talked to John afterwards and he said he didn't buy any of those. It's really impressive that it supports multiple playstyles while still feeling incredibly tense throughout the last dungeon (I wasn't even able to fully heal up before the final boss!) The uncontrollable party member made fights feel dynamic, and the elemental weakness system combined with the encounter design kept me guessing about the best approach to the tower's upper floors.

Wow this game is so cool! The writing is so nice... The elemental system is really intuitive too, and the skill + encounter design leverages it perfectly.