So I played Tim-Tim 2, and it was very enjoyable! I actually finished the game about a week ago, but I haven't had time to write down all my thoughts about it until now.
I think the best thing about the game is the variety of scrolls you can collect. The powers they give you are all distinct, useful, and fun to play around with, and unlike a lot of games with similar equipment setups, you have enough opportunities to refill MP that you can use your scrolls frequently without worrying about running out, or having to hoard all your MP for boss battles. (Notably, magic refills seem to both drop more frequently and restore more MP than life refills restore HP, and if you can catch several enemies in the area of effect of an offensive scroll, you can often make a profit in MP from the magic refills they drop.) Of course, you should always carry some MP-restoring potions, which are a great help in tough situations.
For most of the scrolls, there's a particular kind of obstacle that you need to use that scroll to get past, but I also found every one of them to be genuinely useful in some situations when I was just fighting and traversing the map, and I wasn't required to use any particular scroll. For instance, the invisibility scroll isn't just good for getting past the eyeball blocks, it also acts as a counter to enemies that use homing attacks. And the lightning, flame, and tornado scrolls aren't just straight upgrades to one another; even in the final dungeon, I found it worthwhile to use all three of them, depending on which enemies I was facing.
The graphics are a good example of how graphics don't need to be incredibly detailed to be good. The environments are colorful and varied, and the NPCs and bosses are simply drawn, but very expressive. I think the graphics would be well worth studying for anyone who feels they can't draw graphics that are realistic enough, or detailed enough, to use in a game, because they show how, ultimately, thoughtful design will outweigh realism (I like to call this the
Order of the Stick Effect.) I especially liked the part where you first meet the elder gnome, and his beard makes up the entire landscape. (I was a little disappointed that you don't really see surreal ideas like that for the rest of the game; the environments you explore from then on are all pretty typical video game settings. Actually, one thing I think could be great is if the Elder's beard made up some of the walls in rooms off the main path in the second half of the final dungeon: most people probably wouldn't notice any significance in that particular wall design, among all the background elements from other areas of the game, but to savvy players, it could act as a way of foreshadowing who it really was that was behind all the tribulations Tim-Tim has gone through.)
The controls for jumping and running are smooth and intuitive to play with (amazingly so, really, considering that the game seems to run at the default 18 frames per second instead of 60.) However, one thing that annoyed me a little bit was the specific keys the controls used. I'm not sure how most people usually set up keyboard controls (my guess would be that they don't, because I'm probably the only dinosaur left who's still using a keyboard instead of a gamepad for games like this,) but my usual preference is to have the most commonly used buttons mapped to a horizontally oriented set of keys on the left side of the keyboard. Normally I use the A, S, D, and F keys if at all possible (I played all the way through Hollow Knight with dash, jump, soul magic, and attack bound to those keys, respectively, and although that game certainly has its share of head-bangingly difficult battles, I never had any problems with not being able to remember which action was bound to which key, or pressing a different key than I meant to,) but I can deal with the convention that seems to be standard in Japanese doujin games (and to have been picked up by most people on itch.io) where Z and X are used for everything.
But adding the A key, which is on a different row from Z and X, threw me off, and I found it hard to get used to. So although I realize it would require a highly impractical amount of effort to add a feature like this at this late stage of development, I do wish there was a way to rebind the main keys. I think it would be fine if you could just assign jumping and the two item slots to any letter keys.
I like the way there are several distinct regions of the world map: from left to right, you could roughly divide it up into the dwarf caves, the forest, the mushroom fields (with the human village in the middle,) the goblin cave, and the ruined desert town, with gradual changes from each of these zones to the next (you see trees outside of the forest area, but they're not as dense or as tall.) That makes the world feel like a place with internal logic to it, instead of just a series of arbitrary levels. What I don't like is the way that almost all the areas of the world map are arranged in a horizontal line, because it can take an excessively long time to get from one place to another, and you'll probably want to backtrack to the gnome village several times because it's the only place you can get the high-end potions for most of the game. (However, there is a good amount of variation in enemies as you travel through each area, which keeps the gameplay from getting monotonous, even if you're backtracking through areas you've already been to.)
I think it might be better if the villages and dungeons were divided up between multiple horizontal planes, with several ways to go up and down between them (and more shortcuts could open up as you gain new abilities.) That would allow players to revisit places they've already been without spending so much time just running back and forth, and it would open up more opportunities for players to find secret entrances they couldn't get to before, when they first visited an area with fewer abilities in their repertoire.
(I guess most people would just have a knee-jerk reaction that there should be a fast travel system that lets you instantly warp between any villages or dungeons you've been to, but I think a feature like that is detrimental to the sense of setting in a game like this, because it means that, once you've been to each fast travel point once, all the areas in between them effectively cease to exist, and you no longer have a world with any coherent geography to it. I think this kind of game usually feels better when, as you progress through the game and gain new abilities, you can take faster paths between areas, and find new secrets in them, but you still can't ignore them entirely.)
In the second half of the final dungeon, there are several branches that lead to chests with 50-coin awards, but by that stage of the game, there's probably nothing left that you'd want to spend money on, which makes it pointless to go down those branches instead of just going straight to the boss. Admittedly, I think that in any game where you collect new abilities over time, it's kind of an inherent problem that by the end of the game, when the player is supposed to have everything, there isn't much left you can give them as a reward for exploring any optional areas (how many RPGs have you seen with superbosses like Omega and Shinryu that give you rewards that literally do nothing?)
However, if you could get MP-refilling potions, or maybe even one of the purple potions that fully refills both your HP and MP, from the chests in those branches, I think that would make them much more worthwhile to go to, especially in light of the fact that the final boss almost requires you to use potions to refill your MP. I don't think it's an excessively difficult battle in general (his attacks can be tricky to dodge and deal a lot of damage, but that's appropriate for the final boss,) the issue is just that most of the bosses summon regular enemies that you can kill with the knife to get MP refills, but that tactic is a lot less viable in the final boss battle, both because he summons regular enemies much less frequently, and because he has much more HP you need to get through, which means you need to spend a lot of MP on your own spells.
Overall, I give Tim-Tim 2 PROFIT! out of 10. It's a fun little adventure that does a great job of creating a light-hearted, storybook feel, both with its graphics and with pjbebi's soundtrack, which conveys an appropriate feel for each area, while always retaining the sense of a journey into the unknown. It's reminiscent of a lot of old DOS shareware platformers like Jill of the Jungle and Crystal Caves, but with more polish and thought put into its design (for instance, Tim-Tim's hitbox is actually slightly smaller than one tile of the background, which creates some wiggle room and makes it easier to jump into a small passage; most platformers in the early 90s didn't think of that, and it made certain jumps very annoying to make.) It's a good example of how the OHRRPGCE has grown to be flexible enough to handle other genres besides RPGs effectively, but I think it's well worth playing as a game by itself, without considering any technical details of how it was made.