First I will say I know the developer so I am trying to give the most honest review I can. This is so I can see them grow and improve.
First say I really like the game and I am really impressed one person did this.
Summary:
The good: The battle system, the dialogue, THE ENDING!
The bad: some lack of polish, the duration.
Normally JRPGs try to grab you with battle systems that are complicated, in a way to promise you will stay engaged with it for its duration. Normally this brings good boss battle, but ton of really repetitive random encounters, that mostly serve to grind up. Runemaster's diary does none of that, but rather have a well crafted simple system that makes every battle feel like a boss battle. You have only a limited set of actions (and combo's ... but those are basically actions) but in every battle I felt all serve some function to allow me to defeat enemies. Either by dealing damage efficiently, or by stalling enemies stronger actions. It is really hard to find any RPG that puts that kind of care in its design, and this is what I loved most about the game.
The dialogue is incredibly funny, with almost every interaction giving you either some back up story of the characters or some joke with an unexpected twist. You can notice how well crafted those are. While at first I thought there were typos on some character dialogue, it took me a while to notice those are actually part of their personality (THEY SPEAK DIFFERENT OF COURSE, DUH!), so even that was taken care of. The plot starts at something that sounds really generic, but then the characters are flesh out and you start to notice it is part of much more complicated world building (while still making fun as how generic it sounds). The ending got me really hooked, can't wait to see how this continues.
The music is nice. There are a couple of tracks that stuck with me (the last fight music was a banger) but mostly they serve their function without overstaying their welcome.
Now for the things that are lacking: the game is short. I think it has some secrets that I haven't discovered yet, but even with that it is short. I think this is a price to pay for how well crafted the story beat is. If the game was longer, this would be harder to maintain (especially for one person).
Also, there are some elements that I think lacked a bit of polish. To name a few; the transition to the death screen, the fact that new game appears on top of continue after dying (ALMOST LOST MY SAVE TOO MANY TIMES!) and getting leafs putting a textbox every time you get one (which felt really disruptive, a VFX/SFX after the first time would had been better). I understand polish is never ending for a game, so the list would never finish for the developer, and while I certainly feel the game was "almost polish enough" it could be better with some tweaks.
PLEASE keep up the good work :).
