Hi.
I just finished Runestory. I played it on Onion OS on a Miyoo Mini Plus for a true GB experience. Here’s my feedback for the game:
Art: Really liked the art style for both the tiles and characters. Pretty simple, but it gives off a warm vibe that I appreciated. I especially liked the forest tiles as well as the enemy sprites. Some use of the tiles looked a bit choppy at points but I didn’t mind it.
Story: Very basic story but that’s understandable for a game of this scale. In a fuller version ideally we’d get to explore more about who Lady Dime was and how you are completing her prophecy.
Characters: I liked all four marriage candidates. Ended up marrying Olive since she was easy to romance. I had a hard time figuring out what Raven or Penny liked. I found it funny how you could buy veggie sandwiches from Sonia and give them right back to her to raise affection. Dialogue was decent but I would have liked it to vary more based on the amount of affection you have with them.
Music: Nothing much to say about it. Just didn’t leave an impression. I apologize.
Gameplay:
- I liked the movement and attack speed of your character. When you take damage, there should be a couple frame interval where you are invulnerable. Either that or taking damage should throw you backwards a bit so you don’t continuously take damage through collision.
- Bosses looked cool, but they deal massive damage without any balancing. I ended up beating the bosses by raising my hp to 48 and then enduring the hit while swinging like crazy. It would be a good chance to make use of armour, potions, abilities or special weapons. Maybe also give the bosses their own unique fight style and remove their minions.
- Pausing the game causes enemies, even bosses, to respawn instantly. This was annoying since I used food to heal during boss fights. I had some frame rate drops when fighting multiple enemies at once.
- The gardening and cooking mechanics were pretty solid. I would have liked there to be a bank mechanic so that I wouldn’t have to risk losing half my runies in combat.
- Locked doors in dungeons would lock again sometimes after exiting the room. Would have liked it if losing caused you to respawn outside the dungeon instead of back in bed. There could have been healing points in more spots in the overworld.
Overall, I enjoyed playing but would like to see some of these idea implemented into future games. If you balanced the combat, added some quality of life features to adventuring and fleshed out the story and romancing I think you’d be making an incredible gameboy game that I’d definitely want in my collection. I hope you take the feedback in stride and I will be following you for future releases.