I'll look into the soft lockdown, but until someone actually reports when and where it happens, its really hard to hunt down, as I can go through the scene just fine with a tester character. As for the rest.. Should try to avoid the Lamias then, eh? Not all enemies, can, or should be easy beat up targets, at least thats my philosophy.
That said, with several people bringing them up I could adjust them a bit depending what difficulty you're on. Far be it from me to ignore feedback. ^^
If I'm allowed to, I'll send you a PM with the save if that helps any.
Regarding the Lamias, I agree with you that there should be tough enemies. Take everything I say with a grain of salt though, I'm only one person, but here's my mindset when playing the game.
I have a bad habit of blunt-forcing my way through RPG Maker games, min-maxing to try to counter the poor balancing of the combat system. Hold on, hold on--yours is, ultimately, fine. I have reservations, but seriously,
it works. The first enemy in the game is not liable to three-shot me while I tickle it for twenty rounds. From what I've seen , it is very clear where I need to go, the maps are well-designed and make good use of the space. You don't have random dirt-paths in the floor going off-screen as if they actually led somewhere, and the actual scene transitions are logically placed. Seriously, this is the only game of this sort (WIP H-Game) I've seen that implies a doorway on the side of a building by a path leading up to the wall. That is brilliant.
That aside, my strategy is to Spam Wide Strike whenever possible, only use MP for healing, and kill absolutely everything for grinding and, more importantly, the heal on level up. Gold is a 'too valuable to use' commodity as I'm not finding a lot of it from killing monsters (at least at this stage in the game, or I might be missing something). Therefore, I never use Inns, because 50 gold for a heal is insane when I can't make that back. I'm not sure if you intend for me to get money by selling the item drops but if it is, there needs to be a sign or something saying 'Hey, this is how money is made in the world.' But I'd be extremely reluctant to sell anything.
So that puts Health at this odd priority in my mind. It's more of a currency than gold is in the game. Everything I do in the game is to minimize health loss and to maximize the time I need between using MP potions to use more of the heal spell. I've been running from battles in the Tower alot, not to avoid them but because having a Lamia showing up with two parasites makes things infinitely worse as I can get both poisoned and diseased (I think. I only fought one battle like that. It was extremely long and punishing, almost won, but ultimately lost to poison. decided to avoid any other battle like that).
But I kill absolutely every encounter on the map to level grind. I remember the game being incredibly difficult when I first played it a long while ago. It is easier now, or I at least think its easier. Beyond that, I don't know if it's through design or my own level-grinding. Still, probably the most difficult part is the town. Many slimegirl fights, very little options to heal. While losing fights is a mechanic of the game, being presented with a situation where it's difficult to avoid unintentional loss and snowballs into sequential losses. I'm okay with it happening out of the blue and not being able to exit, but some sort of fixed HP recovery to offset the annoyance of losing would be appreciated, if only because it's the start of the game and the options the player has in battle are very limited. Be it the guard at the gate with a stash of potions or napping somewhere, just something. But on the issue of the Slime Gem, would that make the scene that much more easy with for a player with it equipped? Not so much in the grand scheme of things, the player is taking damage they can't heal easily, and there's a boss fight at the end.
One last thing in terms of combat-mechanics, I tried spoiler tagging it buuut it seems the usual spoiler /spoiler in brackets no work....
The Tower boss. Hopeless boss fights/scripted losses are always weird to critique on. One one hand, I have every means to kill the boss in three turns--Smite, Mana Potion, Smite. So far, it's the only time I've used the Smite spell. But doing that in round one just renders the boss immune until I lose. The first time I attempted it, I blew a good amount of my items before I realized it was a scripted loss, whereupon I surrendered to skip the rest of the fight. True, all of my items I got as drops. I never bought anything other than a sword, but I still felt cheated. At this point, maybe seal the player's skills and have Kitty's potion unseal? It's usually obvious that a battle is meant to be lost in RPG's. Golden Sun: You do pitiful amounts of damage, the enemy can one shot you. Paper Mario, it's outright stated that Tubba Blubba is invincible. Tales of Symphonia:
extremely hard boss fight, one that can be won but certainly not by first time players. Again, take all this with a grain of salt, but this actually annoys me as a player more than the softlock.
Hoo. Okay, few other design things I noticed along the way:
Right at the start of the game, I'm given the option to go down or right. Upon heading right, I find the mountain path thing, get exposition, get a Y/N dialog box. I select YES, get denied anyway. It's been ages since I've messed with RPG Maker, but you have a flag somewhere that tracks if the player's been to the top of the tower--trying to go east after saving town stops me. I don't mind being told I have to go somewhere; i grind my teeth when the game gives me an option, and then says no I have to go somewhere. If possible, can you use that flag and bypass the dialog box? It's a minor thing, but it's perhaps one of the first things found in the game.
Moving on, I get why Home doesn't have a map to it (lot of work for a map not often used), but can I get a free heal out of it via a 'I slept' dialog box? It's my house for crying out loud. The only thing against it is that this makes the "inn" at the first "town" obsolete. It's worth mentioning that this inn is the only one I used since it was so early in the game. By the time I saved the town, I was relying on heal spells/level-ups/MP potions to carry me forward.
I had a minor issue in trying to figure out what enemies lead to a direct game-over upon loss and which others didn't. But I save-scum enough out of habit that I lost fights more out of curiosity than anything else.
That about wraps it up. This is a great game, one that surprised me once as I started looking at the sort of level design and thinking about the technical stuff behind it. I mean, the pause menu alone has more effort put into it that some of the RPG Maker games I've played (which, by the way, I discovered I can bring it up in cut-scenes when there's no dialog box up. Probably a RPG maker issue, but worth noting). Ultimately, that's why I've typed up this mini-essay of feedback for you--you deserve some extensive feedback for all the work you've done. It may be just me, and it might be
just me who has these issues, but it's still a viewpoint worth reporting.
Once I get past the bizarre softlock, I hope to give a bit more feedback. What I hope to see is that everything smooths out once things move beyond the first twist/prologue(?). I do want to play more of this, to see how it goes as what few strands of plot so far has been interesting.
Hope all this helps somehow.
My game must be awful to an anthophobian..
