Bounds (Demo)

finished the demo, it left me with a positive impression. the strong sides of it are definitely the world, which is meticulously crafted and wonderfully weird - at times you even forget that this is supposed to be the far future of our universe, that's just how alien it gets XD the dialogues are also wonderfully written - i have a feeling that you've made short stories or tried to write books before picking up rpg maker, it certainly shows - in a good way, of course. the way you can choose different scenarios is also good, though the best way is definitely to play from top to bottom, the story feels a lot more complete. if i had to pick my favorite one, it would be the third scenario - it's the pinnacle of alien weirdness that this game caught like a lightning in a bottle.

the weak sides of the game are the ones that are concerning the gameplay - the game is set in the far future but both the maps and the battlers look like they're from some fantasy adventure. i could help with that - i have a lot of sci-fi resources that would fit well for the game - tilesets, characters, battlers... you name it! the next thing is that the game usually follow the formula of "tell, don't show" - you like to use cutscenes but they're usually just full of dialogue and descriptions - while some things would be hard to show with just the field sprites, you could still make other stuff appear via cutscenes instead of putting in descriptions - you have the ability to do so - use it! the battles aren't hard but mostly long and dull, the enemies don't have that much range in their arsenal of attacks and you usually just spam healing as one character and spam normal attacks as the other, lmao - but this game is more about the story and the battles aren't that important, though if they'd be better it would have an impact on the entire game, same with the rest of the detriments. think of the game as a machine with its different elements as cogs - the story and dialogue cogs are in perfect condition but the gameplay ones are rusty and work on god's will - they're a liability to the whole machine. as such, it's better to keep the entire thing in a stable condition.

the game also has bugs, mainly concerning freezing - from what i gather it's because a character tries to move in a space that is occupied by an impassable tile. i reckon that's because you did one event with the movement planned out specifically for it and just copy-pasted it over the other possible paths xP a solution to this would be either to go over each event like this that could be problematic (there's an absolute SLEW of these in the train section of the first scenario) or just make it so that there are only 1-2 paths that the player can procced by to continue playing, whichever you find easier to do.

all in all, this is great - it's rare that a game with a world and story this polished comes out on gamejolt, no less in rpg maker - a gem in the rough, you just gotta polish it a bit - if needed, ask me for help and i'll find what i can do - i have a lot of experience with rpg maker and would love to see this game come to a full release - perhaps even make a playthrough of it once that happens. until then, wish you and your project well.

Maken, you uploaded the wrong file - in RPG Maker VX Ace use the Compress game data option and then upload the file that will be made as a result of that operation - currently the game just doesn't work :(