LOL That's pretty much how I feel when I'm playing someone's game.

"Umm... what? What's happening? What's this place all about? What does all this stuff do? Why am I even here?"

I noticed the "time elapses during pause" thing, too. Makes it a guessing game, trying to guesstimate how long my games are. I'm not exiting from the thing for every smoke break. If game time is going to continue to pass while your game is paused, doesn't that kinda make the "pause" feature rather pointless?

I hate puzzles where there are riddles or poems and I have to figure something out. Or buttons to press and it's not immediately obvious what they do. And yeah, it's worse when there are encounters on the floor where the puzzle is. That happened every time in "Shadow Of The Towers".

I didn't know "inventory" was pronounced that way.

And yeah, the walls surrounding a staircase are different from regular walls. Place a staircase in the middle of a room with no walls connecting to it, then have a look at it.

And yeah, there is a discernible graphical difference between false walls and regular walls, but you have to be looking for it to find it. In my humble opinion, false walls are not a fair way to hide secrets. Unless perhaps it's made patently obvious that we should be looking for false walls all over the place. Even then, who wants to check every wall?

Some nice work there. I like the way you gloss over some of the encounters.

Yeah, I'm a bit hesitant to actually try solving that puzzle, because when I was playing it, I was reading those poems, and it was like, "oh gosh, I don't even want to try deciphering this". If you haven't already, you should check out my let's play of Whispers in the Woods. That game is comprised almost entirely of word puzzles.


I'm aware that some people pronounce it differently than I do. Maybe I'm saying it wrong, maybe I'm not, but I think that's part of the fun of videos like this, hearing how differently people say certain words.

I played "Whispers" years ago during 2006. Not a favorite. When he described the game as "all sorts of puzzles", I was thinking it was gonna be something else (like the stuff in this game).

I might not mind the "figure out what the ****'s going on" puzzles if that was all the game was about. Like Myst or a classic text adventure. But in a regular game with a story and monsters and battles, coming across a puzzle like that brings the pace to a crawl while time is spent figuring out what to do.

I wasn't knocking the way you pronounce it. Was just mentioning it. Didn't mean to sound sarcastic if that's how it looked (I just realized that what I had said could possibly sound that way). It's cool, though.

Really nice stuff there, and your narration is great. I'll have to check out some earlier episodes some time.

Try not to fall asleep watching them.

Watched the previous three. (I'm watching you play this game backwards )

Agility does have an affect on turn order, but... umm... it's pretty bizarre.

The differences between the numbers need to be much more significant than what you're seeing there.

For example, I had a guy with 30 Agi, and a guy with 50 Agi. The guy with 50 obviously gets a turn first. So far, so good. Now I also had a guy with 15. You'd think the guy with 30 would get a turn before the guy with 15, but... umm... no. The guy with 15 got his turn first. So it's kinda broken. I had to fiddle around with it to get a turn order that I wanted. 15 had to be reduced to 5 and 30 had to be increased to 35 in order for "30 guy" to get a turn before "15 guy". So I ended up with 50, 35, and 5. There needs to be at least that much of a difference between the numbers in order for the turn order to be consistent with the numbers we're seeing.

If I remember correctly, your characters in this game all have Agilities that are very close to each other. Not a bad thing. Maybe turn order isn't significant or important in this game.

There was something else I wanted to comment on, but I forgot what it was. I'd have to rewatch those episodes to find out what it was.

That's why I start preparing my comments as I go along.

I remembered what it was.

You were kind of complaining that it's bad game design when you have to use or discard items to make inventory room for new ones found in treasure chests. In Chronicle's defense, he doesn't know how many encounters a player will be getting into, and therefore how many restorative items the player will be using up. Even if he did know how many battles there were going to be, he still doesn't know how the player is going to play out the battles. Will the player attack melee and miss a lot of times, affording the monsters additional opportunities to do damage? You can't really anticipate how much damage the player will be taking. So that's two random elements that we can't predict when designing a game (random encounters and how each battle plays out). This is a rare occasion where "more" is "better". It'd rather have too much stuff than not enough.

Also, if there weren't treasure chests all over the place, the dungeon would probably be a boring place to explore. Now Chronicle could have put money in all those chests, but I don't know how that would affect his game's economy (too much money available to the player can be a bad thing).

Just a few thoughts on that issue. I'm not saying it's not kind of annoying to have to discard something to make room for new stuff. It is. But it's also a blessing in disguise.

Oh, yeah, I understand that. I thought people might mistakingly think I was blaming Chronicle Games for my overfilled inventory, so at 19:50 of Ep10, I tried to clarify that it was entirely RPGM3's fault that I was getting too many items. Guess I didn't make myself clear enough.

Actually, I just hate the bag inventory system. Having to be THAT picky about items only belongs in games that really need to emphasize survival and prioritizing like the horror genre. RPGs should just stick to the 99 limit per item thing.

I guess this is gonna sound bizarre, but I enjoy inventory management in RPG Maker 3. I like to be very organized so that I know exactly what I have. I distribute the items amongst my guys based on item type. "This guy will carry all (or most) of our Hp-restore stuff. This other guy (usually a healing mage) will carry all of our Mp-restore stuff." The emphasis is usually on healer-mage and/or offensive-mage carrying Mp-stuff and then the Hp-stuff and other stuff is given to the other guys. When I get something new, I know exactly where it should go in the party's inventory. When I need to use something, I know where to look for it.

I also like the default shopping because it allows me to do exactly what I want to do. With the above in mind, I'll have healer-mage and/or offensive-mage shop for the Mp-stuff. The other guys shop for Hp-stuff and misc stuff.

Another thing I do differently from how Draygone does in his videos, I sell off useless equipment and accessories so that they don't needlessly eat up inventory space. I decide who's going to get which accessory and then usually stick with what I've decided, for the most part (I may have two guys exchange accessories now and then). My parties carry around only the equipment they are using. Anything that's not going to be used gets ditched or sold.

I like to be organized. (What's the smilie for "anal retentive"?)

Frankly, the main issue I have with RPGM3's shop system is that the shopkeeper's dialogue is so slow, I'm constantly mashing X to get the text to actually go at a decent pace, and wind up triggering options by accident as a result. You've seen how often I go into the wrong menus.

And I have maybe only one or two accessories in my inventory that aren't equipped right now. I will admit, I do tend to be a bit hesitant to trash items that I can't buy anywhere. I mean, what if I need it later?

I'm not positive on this, but I think I've done it. I don't usually speed up the text... but can't you just hold down X to speed it up? Then after it reaches the end of the dialogue and puts up the menu or "press to continue" button, you'd have to release X and press it again to continue?

And ahhh... If it's something I can't buy anywhere, I might be tempted to hold onto it even if it's not immediately useful. So yeah, there's that to consider, too.

Also, I'd just like to clarify, I'm not trying to push an agenda here, like "My way of doing things is the best" or something like that. Just having a conversation (a fun one at that ). Just thought I'd mention that I'm not trying to be pushy by sharing a bit about my playing style.

Oh no, of course not. That's another thing about let's plays, is you get to see other play styles of choice.

Yeah, the problem is that the menu options pop up right as the text stops, and I instincively press X again to go to the next window of text.

Today is Wednesday.



In this episode, we have plot, we have history, we have tails, and we have a giant merman... which has a different kind of tail.

Only one episode this week? Boo-hoo!

This game you're playing looks pretty good. So far it looks better than the schlock I played in the past.

The night inside the town looks alright. It's kinda dark, but I can make out what's going on. When you stepped out onto the field, it's too dark there and I can't make out hardly a thing. Had the same problem with my games. Night time is wayyyy too dark in RPG Maker 3.

Well, now that that "Slayers' Reign" retrospective thingy is over, it's time to return to "A Light in the Sky", with two videos featuring a boss eerily similar to a boss found in "A Ronin Story".

Watched the first one. This still looks like a pretty good game. As you were visiting the various towns, I kept noticing unusual building placements that caught my interest. I kept thinking, "Wait, turn and look over there! I want to see what that is!" Guess I'll have to play this game some time. Although it looks like the towns have way too much slowdown.

All of my work has the swirly effect (both visual and sound effect) before battles. It's indistinguishable from the real swirly effect for random encounters. Not that hard to do. Just two lines of code before the battle and battle result branch.

Yeah, the slowdown is crazy in this game, but at least the towns look nice.

Watched the second one. The game's getting more complicated. And that tunnel has to have loads of slowdown, what with it being the "Mine" graphical style and being so big on that one floor.

I have to suspect that the bombs are being kept track of as a variable that tells the program how many bombs the player has, and then there's just one "Bomb" in the treasure inventory. It's one of the most basic ways to have more than one of a treasure item. My own games do that in spades.

As for that row of boxes that you can't blast your way through... how wude!

Oh, look, two more videos before Magcon. Here, I go from "don't care" to "totally invested" in 0.0018 megaseconds.