Just finished playing 0.15. Overall I thought it was a decent game, dialogue was okay to the point that I didn't fast skip over most of it -- it could probably be edited up before final release, but nothing that should be the focus this early into development. In terms of plot, mechanics, and aesthetics, if you liked A Goblin's Tale / The Rise of Vruk, you'll like The Legend of the Goblins.
Stability:
Crashed quite a few times while playing. Usually when transitioning between map areas, or in the middle of dialogues. No real rhyme or reason for why; a sequence of actions which may cause it to crash one time would cause no issue the next time. Thankfully the auto-save didn't make it too much of an issue to continue.
Gameplay:
A bit grindy, but not much. As a bit of a strategy guide to players, it helps to spend your initial money on armor, so that you can hunt animals without taking too much damage. Get some easy XP farming bunnies & deer, sell extra meat, then get enough to be able to equip yourself with a full set of armor and 2 spears. Then move on to the forest with a buddy, switch them to the Seeker class (to double gold gain and have a tank protecting you), and attack minotaurs. By level 5 your tank should be able to withstand a Lvl10 minotaur at 100% difficulty, while your MC whittles away at the enemy. With a Seeker, the gold should be rolling in so that you can easily afford to get all 3 of your goblins the top tier armor. From there, it is just a grindy battle that can last up to 10 rounds per enemy, with little to no risk of damage to your own guys.
The main grindyness comes from resource hunting. And I'm not sure what's wrong with the programming, but it seems like when a new quest calls for resources, there is no consideration given to whether you already have pre-harvested enough of that resource, meaning you have to go and collect the resource again. Might be a limitation of RPGM that quests must have specific actions taken and cannot look at existing item in inventory.
Grindyness also comes from the virility quests. There are basically the same 3 quests that only give you 5-10% virility, and you lose 1% per day. You start at 0% virility, so you spend a week repeating the exact same quests to get up to 100%.
I did like the timed events, they added a unique flair not found in most RPGM games.
Art:
Was decent. Again, very similar to the art style of A Goblin's Tale / The Rise of Vruk if you're into goblins using their drug-containing body fluids to corrupt women into seedbeds. There are some animations. Have to give a big thumbs up to the impregnation scene -- the ovum fertilization animation is a nice touch and something not many pregnancy-tagged games do.
Mechanics that could use rethinking / rework:
- Weapon durability. Glad they took it out of 0.15 release. Seemed like 30 attacks and the weapon breaks. Which is a bit too few IMHO. A typical battle with a Lvl10 minotaur could run you 10 successful attacks. This means you can fight 2 fights before you need to swap weapons, or risk the thing breaking. And you usually face 2 bats in 1 fight, meaning you'd risk a weapon break if you got into 2 fights with them. Maybe increasing durability counter higher (like 100, 150?) would balance things a bit. Otherwise you're having to run around with multiple weapons and swap them out after almost every battle.
- Resource gathering. Scale the units a bit better. Meats are cheap and plentiful to the point you're constantly having to head back to unload it into storage. Killing everything in Forest Area 1 map gets your nearly 90 food, and max you can hold is 99 (RPGM limitation I believe). So maybe each animal provides less meat, but it is worth more per unit and isn't needed as often? Same with flax.
- Battle length is a bit long. Standard enemies take 2-10 rounds each depending on difficulty level. And your tank pretty much does nothing but defend, as their unaided attack power (can't equip weapons) is too low to score any damage on an enemy. Perhaps allow MC to bring both the goblins, so one can tank as a Seeker and the other can help attack as a Fighter and shorten the battle length to 1-5 rounds? Or Attack/Defense stats could probably be tweaked a bit -- I'd rather my tank take minor damage every round and wrap up a battle in 3 rounds than to take 0 damage every round but have a fight drag on 10-20 rounds.
- Crux. Dialogue is reused too much, it just doesn't end up being a pleasant mini-game fast skipping all his repetitive dialogue, seeking him out, and answering his 5 questions. Same goes for finding the dress when you consider the house is far away from anything else you'd need to visit, so it's a lot of unnecessary walking around.
- Hidden shop items. First, I think the mechanic of needing more than gold to make items is a pretty good change from the regular RPGM scene. However, the additional requirement icons don't give enough guidance as to what items are actually required. Also, hiding the items from the purchase menu unless you have at least 1 of the material item isn't preferable, as I tended to dump all materials into storage (which then doesn't count to unlock the hidden menu).
- Bolos. I was expecting the "capture" skill to actually work, sort of like throwing a pokeball. Instead, it just did reduced damage versus a normal attack and was not needed to capture her. You can just standard attack / kick her until she is beaten and the game progress as normal.
- Classes. While I like the idea of multiple classes a character can be, there seemed to be no significant benefit to multi-classing, other than unlocking some skills. I would have thought starting a goblin out as a tank (to survive encounters and beef up HP & Defense) then switching to fighter (to allow equiping weapons and beefing up Attack) would have been a valid strategy. However, the stat gains from one class do no carry over to the other. Can there be a base character parameters set, and each class has +/-% adjustments to parameters for "equipping" that class? That way gaining 2-3 levels as a Seeker has some benefit to a Fighter. As it is, switching classes is quite punitive if going from Lvl10+ in a class to Lvl1 in the other class, as you essentially revert back to a newb again. Thus essentially no reason to switch classes, and then no real reason for the class system in general.
Overall:
A good game. And a very engaged developer, who reached out to thank me for & discuss integrating some of my feedback into the game design.
