Eternal Tale: Seal of the Four Heroes (Demo)

Hello,
Last week I played your game on stream. Overall, I thought it was fairly mediocre with a sudden jump in difficulty.

Eternal Tale features some nice attention to detail to maintain the "lost NES game" aesthetic, such as making some screen wipes/fades have a limited number of fades.
I think one of the biggest problems with this game is how wordy it is. It took far too long before I felt like I had been finally set loose on my adventure to save the princess. It feel like everyone just had too much to say when things could have been cut back a lot fewer words and sentences.

There is a funny dichotomy between this game and the game I had played just before, as both games present themselves as "lost NES games", both use the same asset pack, but the game before had so much more interesting content and got to it faster. From the very beginning the player is able to make compelling choices: the gender of their character, the class they play as, and they even have starting cash with a variety of weapons to equip allowing the player to decide what weapon will suit them and their class best. Exploration was rewarded well which meant all of these small little choices the player could make lead to a more compelling version of Eternal Tale, and I wish it was Eternal Tale that followed a similar formula, instead of spending long amounts of time talking, and railroading the player through the decisions they could make.
While talking about the previous game: I want to give the dev of Eternal Tale the same feedback I shared with the dev of the other game: this asset pack seems to have become quite popular as a number of games are using this asset pack. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, other than the fact that it only serves to detract from your game's originality. If one lacks the artistic ability to make wholly original assets, then I at least recommend taking the assets you purchased and spending some time in a photo editor to edit the assets to be unique to your game, such as adjusting the color profile or rearranging details on some tiles, merging tiles with different sheets, etc.

The game also unfortunately lacks WASD keyboard in put. There are a variety of keyboard config plugins that are free and take less than a minute to set up in a project. There is rarely an excuse to not include basic key-rebinding so that players can play the game with the controls they are most comfortable using.

If you'd like to watch my experience with your game, I've linked the archive below. You can click the timestamps to jump to when I start playing your game.

Great work! And now really for the NES ;-)