Its a shame the RPGM isnt appreciated by most. He did create a very big city, heavily populated and all those cars and traffic, the city feels alive. And the rain and thunder poor Monica had to walk thru, that was beautiful. I wonder how much work he put into it, only to see here the feedback is not too great on that regard.
Im on the majority opinion here though that it can be better as a VN/Renpy with clickable maps to travel to. But i did love the car dialogues going on from inside the car while traveling, that added to the immersion. Hope he doesn't cut any of the story and dialogue. In Renpy its easy for players to skip fast by clicking the mouse if you don't like to read them, we all win.
The problem with RPGM style games (this is not AN RPGM game btw), is that many developers seek to utilize the land they created and eventually end up making you run all over the place, from one end to the other, between each step of the gameplay, artificially extending the gameplay time while not actually providing any additional gameplay.
He tried to alleviate this issue at the start by giving you a driver, but instantly fell into that trap the moment you had to do things on foot.
Classic JRPG's where this kind of gameplay came from also had huge maps, but they didn't make you run all over them to do anything. They progressed you trough an area to introduce you to it, to then move you to a new area, have you do things there to learn those areas, to then move you on to the next.
Then later you would gain a first ability to fast travel (overworld in most FF style games), making it easy to move from area to area to do quests you were sent there to do from another land.
Then later you would be sent to a new landmass area where you'd again be progressed trough new area after new area to learn where everything is, to then gain a second fast travel method (car in overworld in FF7 for instance) that allows you to move quickly between landmass areas.
Then you'd be sent to even more smaller and landmass area's, progressing trough each and learning where everything is in those to then be able to quckly move between all of them with the secondary fasttravel method or sometimes even gain a third fast travel method (in FF7, the water plane, airship, etc) that made going about a huge world even faster.
He kind did it backward giving you a car to fast travel at the start and then cause you to have to run all over the place. And the office area is rather far removed from the hostel area and the house area.
I understand he did this to make the change from being THE QUEEN to having nothing as desolate and miserable as possible, but I think he should transfer the building of these feelings to the scenes (where he already does so) and not make travel that much of a task.
There are some RPGM F95 listed games that quasi solved this issue by putting bus stops all over the place, they cost money but not so much that you'd need to absolutely grind to be able to afford getting anywhere but it would still allow you to move between area's quickly.
This game does have a lot of content.
Good content even, but when you have to start walking around everywhere, it becomes a tasks. Even more so since this "intro" chapter becomes very long because of all this yet has little to provide that's enticing to its target audience.
There are some other places where I understand he is trying to build desolation but goes overboard in his way of doing so. The jail period feels extremely drawn out with nothing really happening for you, while still taking a long ass time.
This could be improved by having something real happen or give you something to do, not just "wake up, walk to bars, shake them 10 times, have a scene happen" 12 times in a row.
You give a scene by scene illusion the fat guard may be able to help you get out, but nothing comes of that.
Why not change it by giving you some actual gameplay to go trough to try and escape yourself, heck, you could even do that on top of the scenes with the guard. At least give us something to do.
I really like the setup of the story, most of the game, the renders are rather commendable quality, but the gameplay and pacing needs some work.
I'd also suggest the developer to invest some time in learning how to pack video and images at high quality without having 1.6GB worth of game.
You are not limited to the restrictions of a game engine like RPGM. Challenge yourself and do things better than others.
Implement some quality of life stuff in your engine, you may end up with an engine others would like to use too.
He said he'll be moving her trough all circles of hell, if all of them are over a GiG in size, dear lord have mercy on our internet connections XD.
