itch.io

I'm used to playing stepmania keyboard, so Im used to the keybinds being dfjk (which also means the inputs are horizontal and two hands can be used). It'd make my play experience better, it feeling more natural and correpsonding better to the ui

One of the best itch games Ive played in a while. What a nice, compact experience! Every item and ability feels like it has a place with little bits of synergy to boot. Rethinking how items work the way you did prevents hoarding, doesnt cheapen wins and feel like a genuine part of the strategy.

Love the reset option. Too many JRPGs try to punish losing by resetting progress, which is stupid. Letting you restart right away doesn't make things easier, there's still a challenge you need to overcome to see the rest of the game.

A suggestion about items in your upcoming project in case you haven't come up with the following. Super Metroid has a lot of secret rooms that increase missile or bomb capacity the slightest bit. It'd perfectly fun loot to get like a second Big Cucumber so you can use like two per battle.

The delay before dodging was kind of too much though. It forces the player be a lot too pre-emptive when dodging and the window between some of the attack's telegraphing and execution can be so small to the point of almost being guesswork.  imo the dodge startup should be small and the recovery longer. Allows for quick reactions (can get a nice DBZ/Jojo feel) while punishing whiffing/spamming dodge. It might be fun to even have a sort of 'strafing' mechanic where if you dodge within an even narrower window before getting hit, you get a small multiplier bonus for the next attack, rewarding risk.

There's potential for abuse since you can make both characters dodge at the same time. Maybe having them dodge at the same time has longer recovery? Costs a little bit of SP like in Indivisible? I like the suggestion below about less I-frames. It shouldn't be punished per se, both characters needing to dodge a big attack is interesting and I'm sure there might be some programming difficulties when trying to implement dodging multiple attacks in quick succession. It's a bit of a design problem I'm sure you can work out.

Do you plan on keeping it to 2 party member fights? I think that could be good, considering the controls scheme. If you plan on a larger overall cast of playable characters, have you tried Child of Light? Its fights have two active members but you can switch freely in such a way it's more like you fight with your WHOLE party, which I really like. Final Fantasy 10 I think does something similar but I havent played that yet.

Overall, I really liked this game! I'm definitely playing your earlier one and am eagerly anticipating whatever is next. I'll look into where else to follow you and I hope you update on your progress there!