Demon God Is Moping

If the title seems incongruous, well, it actually makes perfect sense in its original context.

By far my favorite thing about playing with RPGMaker VXAce Lite so far is configuring the Dragon Quest-style* text notifications for the skills and status effects. (There's other messages that are hypothetically editable which the Lite version won't permit to be edited; a bit disappointing, to be true, but I can tolerate it until I decide if I want to purchase it or not.) There are default styles that can be configured automatically for the skills, but custom messages are much more fun.

Case in point:

"Demon God sings a horrifying song! The party found the lyrics offensive!" (Demon God is, in this case, me using a preexisting enemy design-art, name, basic concept-in a similar but also somewhat different way to the default design. I'll give the VXAce base package this much: Its enemy battle designs, i.e. skills, vulnerabilities, etc., are a big improvement over RPGMaker XP's, which are universally generic and boring as heck.)

And of course, there's also the status effect I came up with that has notifications including "[name]'s heart was broken!", "[name] is moping.", and "[name] got over that broken heart." Hence the title of this post, "Demon God is moping."**

*Dragon Quest was a rather odd hybrid of pictures and old-fashioned text-based adventure games, all things considered. Of course, it's also the most popular JRPG series inside the borders of Japan itself, to the point where it's basically the generic symbol that represents the concept of video games in Japan. As such, the basic configuration of VXAce feels like it's essentially supposed to be a Dragon Quest clone, to the point where I described it to my sister as "Dragon Quest Something: Dragon Questier."

**Actually, my version of Demon God (which is a lot stronger than the default version*** to compensate for the stronger player characters and freely flowing experience points in the practice game I've been building) can't use its strongest attack while that status is attached. So when Demon God is moping, the party's a lot safer than they might be otherwise.

***Roughly a million hitpoints (the most the default engine permits) and innate regeneration at roughly ten thousand hitpoints a turn (which is actually the lowest regeneration rate that the engine will permit for an enemy with so many hitpoints), just for starters. Stronger negative status effect infliction than the original Demon God's (who was pretty good at it), for another. I'm actually still tweaking that "strongest attack" I mentioned above, because it's hard to get good damage calculations, though realizing that this Demon God is basically always going to fight a level 99 party will eventually help a lot, once I've built new equipment for the characters. As it is, the default characters can use basic equipment and a playtest item or two to beat it pretty consistently even though each character currently has exactly one skill that they can only use as a sort of "limit break." Even without the playtest item, they can still beat it most of the time just through judicious use of the Guard command and lots of healing and attack items-I do still need to configure more of Demon God's status resistances.

-Signing off.