View topic - Motrya Chapter Two Released

Just finished this up last night. This was my first exposure to Motrya (I never played the earlier versions) and I must say I was floored.

Kudos to you and your whole team, JSH!

Hmm, I'm wrestling with whether or not I should write out a full-on "review" of the game or just kind of list out my likes and "dislikes" (read: nitpicks)... I really wish I had thought to take screenshots as I played.

I'll just list out some stuff here, steam-of-consciousness style. If you'd like more detail I can elaborate.

(Some of) What I Liked/Loved:
1. Lytesnap (goes without saying, right?)
2. The battle system: Each fight was a real challenge and there is some innovative stuff going on here. It's very rewarding when you figure a battle out and take the enemies down.
3. Presentation: By and large the game has a very consistent, engaging graphical style that I dug. Music and sound effects were fantastic, too (filesize is a little hefty though, eh?)
4. The characters: I love that even the "background npcs" have been given names and a unique voice / characterization. I hope we get to hear more from all of Murlor's school-chums again before the end of the game.
(Some of) My Dislikes (nitpicking ahead):
1. I was confused by the way you learned spells. I read the included readme and all the tutorial stuff in-game but I still didn't understand why some scrolls taught certain characters a new spell but not others and some didn't teach anyone anything (e.g. Toxic I believe). I thought from the descriptions that it was a case of "you can either equip the scroll and have a reusable weak version of the spell that costs no lytes OR you can 'eat it' to gain a powerful but lyte-costing spell version" but that didn't seem to be the case... I guess some of them just teach certain guys spells and some don't and it doesn't matter if you have it equipped? Maybe I just didn't pay enough attention...
2. Map layouts. While I by-and-large loved the graphics sometimes it can be a little hard to tell where the "wallmap" (to use the OHR term) was; sometimes I seemed to be able to just walk all over things that looked like obstructions (e.g. the stage in the restaurant) and sometimes I was obstructed by things that didn't look like obstructions (e.g. many chair-backs I guess). Also, the maps seemed very often to be "askew" by which I mean the npcs seemed to be moving slightly off compared to the backgrounds. It took me out of the game a little to realize that the reason I couldn't, for example, go down the alleyways in the thief town was not because they were too tight but because my guys weren't able to line up correctly (if that makes any sense).
3. Typos/Alignment stuff. There were typos/grammatical things I noticed (can't give any specifics unfortunately). Okay, and here's the pickiest of nits: I'm guessing you used a series of backdrops for the text boxes, yes? They sometimes were cut off by a few pixels at the bottom of the screen and other times floating a few pixels above the bottom of the screen (i.e. usually they were flush with the bottom). Also, certain dialogue boxes appeared in the middle of the screen (sometimes over top of the action). Again, this is the most minor of quibbles but it was something that I noticed.

I went into way more detail on the nitpicks since I feel like that's what you'll actually care about in terms of feedback. I liked the game enough that I'm thinking about playing it again (maybe this weekend) to take some screenshots and do a proper review.

Again, kudos. Job really well done!