Game is good enough to make me overcome my RPGM aversion, but several frustrating things compound over time. First, placing that chest "out of bounds" in Hypno Hell dungeon may have been a nice challenge, but I would never have been able to reach it without a search of this thread. Worse, it conditioned me to keep checking all walls, and in turn led me to find multiple "out of bounds" exits that didn't lead to any secrets. Instead I ended up walking around all over the place and spoiling myself by viewing rooms I hadn't reached yet, or versions of said rooms that shouldn't have been reachable. Alexander's plant dungeon, specifically, has what looks like a second version of the boss encounter room. Alexander's second also had such "walk out of bounds" spots, but the last (incomplete) dungeon is definitely much worse in that regard. You can walk left and right instead of down the hallway when entering the first secret passage. The diagonal stair section will get you messed up really quick if you're using a mouse to move instead of holding down arrow keys. You can also trigger a "cutscene" (cum shrine dialogue) while outside that room but in the wall next to it - which can leave PC stuck inside walls and unable to move altogether.
In terms of plot advancement, it's not clear when "days" actually advance. Yes, sleeping in the bar lets you enter the next dungeon and resets all "daily" things, but there are scenes where PC spends the night in someone's bed - or is out of commission for several nights - which do not do the same. Maybe saying something like "your linking charges will recover when you rest in your own bed" could explicitly point the player towards day advancement. I understand the barkeep content necessitates funneling PC there, but I personally kept looking for alternative places to rest at night, the way the guild is implied to be in the future.
In terms of mechanics, I was severely disappointed by fire. It's my favorite magical element, but in this game it can't hold a candle to the other two. Ice shields and heals. Lightning stuns and repeats (once had it hit 4 times off 1 casting, was glorious). Fire...is a DOT with miss chance. In other games fire is often used as the damage/AOE element, but with most fights being against single opponents, lightning is still much better. I'd increase firepower with AOE strikes (like the fire-lightning storm) that split overall damage by number of enemies - meaning they do more damage against a single target because it's not getting split up. And I would tie enemy miss chance to the number of burn stacks on that enemy, which would give the player incentive to continuously use basic fire against the same enemy, much as lightning stun and ice heal do.
I also entirely avoided the Empowered spell mechanics. I wasn't sure how often they reset or how powerful they were, so I just skipped them. Then I found Purity spells also went off MP but didn't give MP, so I suddenly had to invest in skills I had no intention of using just to be able to use the skills I wanted to. And having to sleep to refill MP after changing skill tree...maybe dropping a coin into the church fountain could be used to refill MP outside of sleep?
In terms of bugs, there's a spot at the end of Alexander's second dungeon (after the 3 paths merge) that calls for "img/parallaxes/par97.png" - but the folder contains "Par97.png" instead. Game would go into "now loading" and hang. I'm on Linux, where capitalization matters. Renaming the file "par97.png" allowed me to proceed.
I also encountered the issue of getting stuck inside the WEST pink barrier in the last dungeon, because the NPC who knocks into PC pushes PC one space - into the barrier. If you walk to the SOUTH barrier instead, the push still happens, but PC ends up on regular floor instead.
Thanks for all of the feedback. I'll go into them one by one here.
1. Out of bounds chest. I can see your point about that secret making you constantly check walls, and that especially being a problem when there's issues with walls that are bugged to let the player walk through them for no reason. I think the main thing to do for me is to fix those bugged walls. The "out of bounds" chest makes it very clear that you're supposed to be able to get up there, by having the chest to begin with, and then by having a text passage when you actually make it up there. I could be wrong, but I think most secret areas like that are similar, giving some sort of indication that you are actually supposed to be able to get there.
2.Time/Sleeping: I'll change the text to be specific that sleeping in the bar is pretty much the only way to pass time and restore linking charges. I think there are a few one-time events that do that, but they say that they restore linking charges, so they should be fine. It seems like the main issue is when the player sleeps but doesn't actually recover charges or progress daily events, which makes sense, so it would be good to clarify that only the bar will do those things. (Changing all sleeping events to progress time and everything would probably be too much work to be worth doing.) I'll also try to find where I implied that the player might be able to rest at the guild. I did that so long ago that I completely forgot about it, and at this point I have no plans to implement that, so it should really be removed.
3. Fire: I recently did a poll on Patreon seeing what element everyone used the most. The results were 22 votes for fire, 24 for ice, 43 for lightning, and 44 for "I use them all/Switch between using them all regularly." I made the poll because I felt fire was too weak, and ice was too strong. From the results, I just decided to buff fire somewhat. I definitely should have made more fights have multiple enemies, even just adding some filler enemies to do so wouldn't be a bad idea. I could do some further changes, like your suggested AOE strike change. If you want a playstyle that makes using fire repeatedly more useful, then Infernal Ignition is probably a better option for your evolved spell. That's one of the things I buffed actually, by making the drawback of its power weaker. It's kind of hard to make it compete with lightning, because players are naturally drawn to the idea of their basic lightning strike being able to do things like cast 4 times in a row. I'd have to go back and check, but I think Fire might on average deal more damage than lightning. Lightning just kind of
feels better, and is deceptively decently defensive because of it's stun.
4. Empowered spells: Honestly, the fact that purity spells forced you to engage with empowered magic is a good thing in my opinion. I never even considered that players might choose to
not use them, as they're basically ultimate spells, and I balance boss fights off the assumption that the player has at least one mana for empowered spells, if not two later on into the game. Also, your post is making me wonder if something is bugged, because from version 0.50 onwards, if you reset your skill tree while having mana, so long as you regain that much maximum mana or more before closing the skill tree, you should get to keep your mana. It was a recently requested change, let me know if that's not working.
5. Par Bug: I'll fix the parallax bug, and adjust the other parallax image to be lower case as well. Parallax images are called by putting the notetag <par> on a map, which then calls for the image "parX", with X being the map number. Since Windows "helpfully" just autocorrects capitalization issues, I had no idea it was calling for a lower case p for "par". Thanks for letting me know.
6.Barrier Bug: You'd think I would have noticed that. Her battler sprite also isn't enlarged, so she looks like an ant. Not sure what I was doing, but I'll fix that as well.
Thanks again for all the feedback, glad you (mostly) seemed to enjoy the game! I'll be sure to fix the bugs you mentioned and make the changes I mentioned above.