I played a bit the game yesterday and Wow! I've been really impressed , what a work you did ! It's even better than i thought ,the game is beautiful. The intro is short but very well drawn , i also love battle backgounds , cutes characters , nice villages and the map too. Battles are short wich is a good thing but you need some levelling before the bosses , although i actually met only two bosses.Music is good although metal on some area is strange... Anyway a must have for the PC Engine that can rank in the upper average.
The bad points:
-french traduction is uncomplete but not too annoying.
-audio tracks seem sometimes too short so they oftenly loop.
-NPC are too static ,they don't even turn your direction when you talk to them,they are like statues.
-The game is missing of sound effects.
-Sometimes loadings are very long when most time they are very quick , i can't explain why , is it my Duo ? I will try with my Duo-R.
-The two bosses i encountered are too small , i wished i had seen some huge half screen beasts.
The good points:
-Very good to splendid graphics.
-Some audio tracks are pleasant.
-Nice packaging.
-french and spanish translations.
I noticed two game modes in the beginning , but i actually don't know what they mean.
I believe we ran out of memory for the French translation, it's a shame, but I'm glad it's still playable in French. For the music, I supposed I could've doubled up the songs so they could last longer, though, that'd take some extra work since I didn't have access to the original songs.
NPC's, yes, they just sit there, & that's always been a bummer for me. IIRC, there was something in the coding that would've had to been completely redone to have them move around. So we came up with the idea for them to stand there, but be animated(blinking, waving, sneezing, etc.). I can't recall if Keranu finished all the frames or not, but, I believe that was also constrained by memory, so wasn't doable.
In hindsite, I believe Keranu wishes he had redrawn a lot of the sprites, though, I can't speak for him. I just seem to recall him saying something along the lines of wanting to go back & redo them all, but, the game had been pushed back & pushed back sooooo many times.