Violet Kingdom is a legitimately good RPG Maker game. The combat in it is both surprisingly fun and relatively well balanced (outside the extremely early game, where fights can be a bit of a slog due to the very large number of enemies in some of the early fights, the lack of AoE, and the fact that you mostly get good gear by fighting the fancy goblins for a bit of time). Despite the large number of party members, almost all of them feel unique in combat and are relatively balanced. Some of them are not as good at certain points, such as Beau seeming to have less late-game options, but I never felt a character was useless, and even Beau was handy in my party for the final boss, just probably not the best choice (and admittedly, I built Beau in a kind of ridiculous way, so some of that one might be my fault).
I will say that the game is not without flaws, but they are pretty minor, all in all. I only ever found a single even slightly meaningful bug, which is extremely impressive given the game's scope. Not all of the maps are that great (I liked some, but there are visible tile mistakes with like two-tile-wide bookshelves only having one of the two used in others). The story I actually enjoyed more than I initially expected going in, but (possibly due to the wide set of party members) some of the characters ended up extremely forgettable. The one downside is that the, although the story tells you where to go next consistently, if you don't remember where to go, there is often very little direction. Thankfully, it seems the forums will answer any questions consistently if you ever forget, and the game is both consistent about telling you where to go and clear about it without breaking the flow of things. Additionally, the game does have some spelling issues, but I did not find them so bad as to diminish my experience, and they never made anything even slightly difficult to understand for me.
The game's length is also quite impressive. It took me 27 hours to take my run through, and although I did most of the side quests, I did not try to do all of them, and I also didn't end up leveling up characters extra or grinding much (I had to grind a small amount for the final boss, but the game gives extremely good grinding gear by that point, so it didn't take long when I could get a character to ~1500% experience per battle). Given that this was made by a single developer, that's a remarkable amount of time. Throw into that the amount of gear options, some of the skills, and the two large "world map" style areas with a nice set of hidden things to look at and find, and it's a game that was so much bigger than I expected going into it.
Altogether, I will say that Violet Kingdom was quite a good game and I enjoyed playing it quite a bit. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a solid JRPG, especially if one enjoys solid combat.
