OK, Pergold. Hell, I’m going to be upfront and call you Frank, since you’ve used your real name during a lot of your advertising.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting your response. I’ve seen a lot of wannabe developers respond to criticism by doing a lot of yelling and denying everything. The fact you actually acknowledged and apologised for stuff is unusual and commendable. It takes a lot of courage to say you made a mistake.
I also want to say that as much as I complained about ECC earlier, there’s something about your game style that convinced me to try again. I spent this evening playing through the first games in your Legend of ZUN series, and I found them a lot more approachable than ECC. Not as ambitious, perhaps, but more polished. You have this unusual fusion of English culture and Japanese fandom that I’ve never seen anywhere else, and some of the stuff you worked into those games was really neat and got a good reaction out of me (In particular Airstrip One sort of blew my mind). You were very committed to the setup, and there were a lot of very neat references [the C5, Nolan’s work with Chuck’E’Cheese, and so on].
That said, I do still feel there are a lot of places that need polishing in future titles.
- First and foremost, you DEFINITELY need to do more playtesting and spellchecking. Legend of ZUN was a lot more stable than ECC was, but it was still full of spelling errors and missing words in sentences – and after an hour of beating down LoZ2's final boss to no avail, I’m convinced the fight is bugged somehow.
(EDIT: I did manage to beat it in a second attempt, but it had an inordinate amount of HP compared to everything else in the game and still took nearly an hour.)It’s not a fun or glamorous thing to do, I know. But you need to get someone else’s eyes on the game to see the problems you’re too close to notice. I feel like you might rush too hard to get games out the door without giving them the attention they need. To quote Shigeru Miyamoto – A delayed game is good eventually, but a rushed game is bad forever.
- Second, I feel like the game balance may need some tweaking. In all the games I played, magical attackers quickly became the only role that mattered. Physical attacks just couldn’t keep up, and it started to become a gag that people like Vasilios couldn’t pull their weight.
More obviously, the encounter rates felt far too high. I spent large chunks of the game just running from fights because the rewards were inconsequential and I just wanted to get to the end of the dungeon. You had the right idea with adding Encounter Decreasers in ECC, but the fact you can’t actually buy them by hand meant they felt too precious to actually use.
- Third – as I said before, your choice of humour was at times very questionable. Again ECC was the worst for this with the aforementioned Gaza Strip joke and some off-colour comments about Yukari abusing Ran, but there was also a lot of underlying attacks about SJW culture. Hell, you made Anita Sarkeesian the backstabbing final boss of Legend of ZUN 2.
I understand that attacking Anita Sarkeesian and them durn SJWs is a trendy and cool thing to do on the internet nowadays, but there are actual people on the other end of the screen who you’re hurting. I can tell you that I have recently started to identify as agender after a lot of questioning and experimentation, so all your joking comments about weak cisgender minds hit me rather close to home.
You seem like a decent enough guy, and I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you just threw that stuff in because it seemed like a funny meme. But please, either do some research on these topics before you write in these offensive stereotypes or just avoid the matter entirely.
EDIT: Having seen the ending of LoZ2 and the fact you portrayed social justice as cultural Marxism, I would definitely suggest watching some videos on the topic.
Here's some
content for you to look at from one of my favourite Youtubers on the subject. (Swearing and stuff, as a warning.)
I hope my previous comment hasn’t upset you too much. I think you have a lot of potential as a developer, and there were little moments of brilliance to be found in everything you’ve made. I just think that you need to put more work into harnessing those positives and ironing out the less-impressive parts.
-Finn