RPGM - General Rowenne [v0.7] [RowenneTheGreatG]

It is a real shame that this game is designed and implemented in this way.
The concept and the potential are very good, it's probably plenty of things to do but getting there is just too frustrating.

As other have said the grind is real, in a couple of hours of gameplay you get nothing done.
I'm ok if there are paths not meant to be taken at the beginning of the game: if the combat system is designed to be hard by yourself and combats are meant to be done when you have an army, i'm totally ok with that, BUT you have to give me alternatives to achieve the goals.
The farming route is a joke, it's even more frustrating than the fights.
I get it: low risk, low reward, but you literally have no other choices: getting wrecked in the dungeon (high risk low reward anyway) or bore you to death farming carrots.

On top of that, everybody is telling the dev that the system is unbalanced and too grindy and very little action has been done. Some corrective actions have been done to ease the beginning of the game but i feel it's still too little.
All you can do requires A LOT of effort and you always get very little reward. If i wanted to play such game i'd just get back to my ex wife.

I personally can forgive a junkyness, little bugs and lack of QoL (unskyppable scenes and such), but a bad design and a stubborn creator is preventing this game from being enjoyable.

I liked the idea. The description on the page is the best part. It's the worst game i ever played in my life though. So bad in fact I'm left wondering if this is a troll or something.

Even with the starter kit in the dungeon(considered cheating you'll be insulted for picking it up) the "great" general Rowenne can't fight bats. In fact that's too generous she can't fight A bat. Usually when a game force you to get wrecked by monsters you at least get some content out of it. In this game it serve no purpose. It's just a big f you go do something else(even though there's nothing else).

Only other way i found to try and make some money is pick up carrots for 3 golds every time you do the minigame(you need 300 gold to build anything).

Speaking of that stupid farm. You don't get the carrots in the field behind the farm(like any rational human being would assume). No you enter the farmhouse and get magically teleported to a new field in some swamp where you pick up the carrots. If not for the fact there's nothing else to do than go click on everything hoping something will happen i would've never known you pick up carrots INSIDE the house.

Also, once you try and go figure out how the building system works(to learn this grind is absolutely not worth your time) you get a warning to use the construction deed immediately after getting it because if you have more than one you will bug the game. That's after you picked up 2 of them because they're the only stupid quests in your village and the very first thing you run into(flawless game design lol).

The art and animations are ok(at least the only 2-3 I've seen were)but the game is just so bad, so unintuitive and so grindy you really should consider going outside, making a friend and taking turn kicking each others in the balls until one of you end up in the hospital. It would be a better way to spend your time.

Reviewing version v0.4, things may change in later versions.

TLDR, look at the images in the game files, or cheat a lot of money (and possibly) stats in, since this isn't worth it as a game.

Pretty much the only good thing I can say about this is that the game is that the renders are generally good.

Well, I skipped a version or two after the initial release here, and I have to say dear god the balancing of this game SUCKS. It did in the first version, and it's just as bad now.

There's a difference between a challenging / difficult game and a painfully grindy game. Seriously, having to spend literal hours trying to legitimately level up and unlock scenes is not what makes a difficult game. This is with the "cheat" equipment chest, which in just about any game would let you one shot most enemies. In this game you get basically just the 1st stage improved armor (IE doing / taking like 15% more / less damage), a few healing potions, and the equivalent of like 7 fights worth of gold. Then the developer insults you in game for daring to reduce the grind by the TINIEST amount.

Like, having experience with bats myself (damn things get in my room at night a few times a year) I wonder how the hell a bat is able to do more damage to a human in "armor" than that human can do with a sword. I can usually ignore it for immersion, but mostly if the character ISN'T meant to be a trained military officer.

You have to fight (and win) between 23 (If you got MASSIVELY lucky and get a sellible equipment drop every time) and 100 bats in order to get one upgrade for your town. It'd make sense that by upgrading your town (or being in charge of a town in the first place), you'd get something outside of a shitty house to live in. Like a (small) amount of gold per day, that you can improve as you build up the town, or a set of low level healing items (farm vegetables) but you don't get anything like that (or I didn't find it if it's somehow hidden somewhere.

There's unskippable, identical scenes that require you to use your mouse to click to advance them. This might not be an issue for someone used to using their mouse, but i always default to keyboard for RPGMaker games. So you want to get a tiny amount of gold from the farm or (once you grind for it) Bar, better enjoy seeing the exact same scene repeatedly.

Once you get the bar, you can hire a new party member for 10 gold per time you enter the dungeon. He has literally nothing when you start, so better hope you didn't sell the drops from the bats to build the bar sooner. He also doesn't heal between times in your party, so if he;s at 25 HP and you leave to rest, he'll be at 25 HP the next time you hire him. You also always have to go back to the bar and talk to him there every time you want to be able to hire him again (right outside the dungeon).

The game has the issue of using video files which ignore the audio settings of the game engine. This is more of a game engine thing, but it's still annoying to adjust the audio in a game, only to suddenly have it start playing sound much louder than I had set it too.

I like the general idea and currently implemented scenes.
Still at the very start of the development so I am willing to ignore bugged/broken parts and unbalanced gameplay.

If you want to try this game, do not forget to use a save editor

Game is terribly balanced in terms of combat and grind. Not worth it unless you use an online save editor to cheat some gold in. Other than that the art is decent. It's a shame since I really like the concept behind the game, but the plot as it is now seems pretty bare bones and the game is kinda poorly implemented.