This has the most depth of the episodes so far. (at the end, I chose "Kill." That's all I'm going to say, to avoid spoiling) But yeah. I like the 16bit sprites. Did you do those?
The story and gameplay is really great. All the other turn-based battle games I've played so far on Newgrounds are put to shame by this. You could really go on to dev console games though. You could release Dead Detention and Alula Falling as a complete package on Steam or other platforms
Another nice addition to a nicely done series, good stuff as always.
Like your first review said, the quality of your artwork is definitely improving. My only real complaint is, you might want to fix how extra leg skin is exposed when Alula is running (bailing from the librarian for example), it looks like something a glitch would be. You should be careful as to what colors you put where and make sure they make sense. Also, what's with Alula in the gym class scene? I suppose it's supposed to be that she's stretching or something, but it looks like she's levitating (even though she probably isn't, or Alula's classmates would be talking about her instead).
The pace of the battles have changed only slightly. You can kill the "attacks cost no mana" guy early by charging an attack then finishing him off when he hits 300 health and the "block often, then attack" strategy still works like a charm, even with blocked attacks no longer costing the enemy any mana. I was wondering if that would change when I first saw that the last fight has enhanced melee damage and wondered if that meant extreme damage output after mana loss, but apparently not (though it makes sense, actually; wizards tend to do more damage with MP than without after all). On the other hand, I do like how hard the last fight is, that kind of difficulty is right up my alley.
*I took off a half star because the 1st guy with a new ability is painfully easy to beat and because the other non-boss with an ability has a repeated ability. If I see 100% ability originality and both of them have to be defeated in at least somewhat creative/new ways, the next episode will be worth a perfect score.
**SPOILER ALERT**
The main story remains interesting, but it's even more interesting that Una from Chronicle Bulletin was mentioned. I wonder if Alula and the Chronicle Bulletin gang will cross paths...
**END SPOILER**
The choice at the end is by far the most interesting addition (not to mention making choices in general is back, great stuff). It'll be very interesting to see what effects that choice has on the next episode.
***And I noticed the "current path" menu button in the upper right corner too (the one with three bars of different length going upward). That's a nice way to keep track of the decisions made in previous episodes. I'm assuming the appearance of this shows that you know how to load data between different flash games.
Question though, when is data saved? I'd hope it would be at the end of the episode only in case data gets corrupted from having data for a previous episode, but not having completed that episode yet (in case you're replaying in order to find the golden astronaut, for example).
**SPOILER ALERT**
P.S. To CaptKirky: your logic is a ways off. Assuming there's both a heaven and a hell in Universe .08 (and there probably is with Death being evil and The Bridge from Chaos Christmas being a force of good), choosing to kill is probably the opposite of what you meant to do since the daughter is probably in heaven whereas psychotic murder punches a ticket to hell, meaning that gym teacher would never see her daughter again if Alula killed her. Sparing her gives her a chance to absolve her sins, and possibly take a more benevolent path that leads to seeing her daughter again in heaven. Besides, if Death (currently the 8-bit skull guy) is either the devil or a buddy of the devil, I don't think he'd have people be players if he knew either those people would never dare kill anybody and/or The Bridge or some force of good would be highly capable of saving their soul from being added to Death's collection.
**END SPOILER**
**ADVICE FOR WINNING FOLLOWS**
P.P.S. To Ericho: turn based RPG fights are more like puzzles than simply "hack this, slash that and I win" (actually, a lot of things in life are if you think about it). If you analyze the second to last fight properly (that's the guy that regenerates mana insanely fast), you'll find you can win in only two turns. All you have to do is use the new Charge ability followed by exploiting his weakness with the also new Blood Missile ability, and you're set.
After that fight, you should watch out for how much damage the boss does, it's quite a bit.
I really lost it when the fourth player came out. It was great to see this good animation. Still, this guy kept reforming over and over. It really got annoying. I just don't like these as much. It gets too repetitive.
I admit that I am not good with RPGs. I think you could just put in one or two fights like this in a game. We want more variety. Well, other people are much better at this. It certainly wasn't bad.
We need more games like this. Good job.
Thanks!
Loving this series! Alula has good art work but the final boss was kinda funny how poorly she was drawn.
Overall it was an awesome episode! thanks :)
Thanks! I'll try to improve how she looks a little in the next patch