talking about the first hour of furquest. hooooo boy
A lack of self-confidence can keep you from making forward progress on your skills and creations. Too much self-confidence causes you to barrel down a path of making something without an awareness of if that thing is good or not.
I backed this game's Kickstarter because I liked the idea at face value. About two months ago, I started getting very concerned about this project when it was clear bitter, the creator, was in a mad dash to get the thing completed, operating on a hellish crunch schedule to meet an arbitrary release date.
This is such a depressing case of someone taking a lot of inspiration from Undertale/Deltarune and not realizing how many disciplines toby was experienced in and how much external help he needed on the ones that he wasn't proficient in, like doing character and sprite art. bitter is alright at doing sprite art, and unfortunately incompetent at everything else.
They're clearly trying to mimic the broad strokes of those games' plot beats and presentation style, but without establishing tone or atmosphere, so you're whipping between melodrama and comedy with no room to breathe. This turns out to be the least problematic thing they try to copy, because bitter cannot write dialogue or music.
It's so mile-a-minute with trying to have a gag on every screen, often several. You know that video satirizing Deltarune fan content where all the hokey-ass characters are competing for who can have the loudest personality quirk? All of them here are like that, they have no sense of place in this world or interiority, they're vapid knockoffs of the casts from Undertale and Deltarune. The comedy writing is terribly paced and brutally unfunny.
If you do not know the basics of making music, do not try to do it yourself for your game. You are not going to be Daisuke Amaya making Cave Story here and learning via brute force. There are plenty of musicians in the fandom, and ones also influenced by Undertale. Talk to one of them instead of trying to wing it yourself and forcing players to listen to terrible music.
The novelty of playing WarioWare minigames for fights is...neat, but they're extremely easy and not fun to play multiple times. There's nothing else aside from dull puzzles on the gameplay front. Let's not going to pretend that the game could suddenly turn a corner and become better. It's bad to its core.
Furquest is a case where I think its creator has holed themselves up in the toxic positivity sphere of the fandom, and does not have people around who can push them to reexamine their work. I would feel genuinely bad for them to read all of this because they're clearly putting a lot of themselves into this game, and went way overboard with trying to fulfill Kickstarter rewards ($75 is less than what most artists charge for character sprite commissions, I'm considering sending them extra money just to feel less guilty about getting good sprite art of my previous sona for such a low price).
But they need to get a reality check at some point and try to carry themselves with more humility in the work they do. Collaborate with other people in the fandom who can cover for the disciplines you're not skilled with, actively seek out honest feedback that you can use to improve your craft. Don't burn yourself out making games that just won't take off like you'd hope. It's a waste of creative passion.
