I really like how this all pans out. The in battle animation... perfect! I could nitpick about how the attacks don't connect or all that, but I think this misses the point. The visual style is right up my alley, I really like it. Given the gameplay is tactical/strategical enough, and I like the story, I would really give the game a good look and maybe put some money into it to play it.

as to how the portraits are used for dialogs... I think I like it. I really like how this pans out. I am not 100% sure the back-to-the-player portrait works, even though I do like how it makes the whole thing looks more realistic. Do you plan to turn the view if the character with the back to the player should show facial expressions? Will you show that with the small character icon? Do you try to get away without facial expressions?

I have to say, I am a big fan of simple facial expressions, or "emoticons", being shown with the character icon in the speech bubble, the way its done in Breath of Fire 4... very simple character icons, about 5 or so unanimated emoticons, but it really helped make the character come alive. Some never games I remember used different big character portraits, exchanging them when the characters mood changed. Also liked this, even though that is more work with big HD portraits like you plan to use.

This way the character portrait might have some added value, if you add an "emoticon" function to it. Also helps to anchor the text to one of the characters, images always trump text in this regard.

Is the text translated to english? One of the sad things about russian literature is that its often not translated, unless its a classic. The CIS region is probably big enough to live of sales there, but still...

This is also a big problem with games developed in russia that you need luck to find a developer that speaks english, so sadly as someone who does not speak russian you have to wait for some eastern european guy that speaks some russian to translate dev blogs and FAQs, or try to decipher googles joke translations.

If there is a translation, I would love to start reading it. You got me interested with your illustrations. Makes the story look like something I could enjoy :)

Don't worry about the similarity to the blacksmith... I think the character gained a lot of unique character with the new stuff added.

Thank you, Gian-Reto, for your feedback!

Do you plan to turn the view if the character with the back to the player should show facial expressions? Will you show that with the small character icon? Do you try to get away without facial expressions?

We definitely will not avoid the facial expressions animations, actually we already have some of our characters' portraits animated for dialogues. They are yet to come to be shown. I'm not sure right now would we show emotions on the small icon or not. By now this point wasn't discussed in our office.

Well, it of course depends a lot on your portraits and the style.

BoF4 got it to work very well, but then this was portaits in anime style (by one of my favorite japanese illustrators of all time, sad that he mostly did character design and didn't draw Manga AFAIK). This means the characters faces were drawn in a way that made best use of the low pixel count of the PS1 and the small icons, and "helper symbols" like in mangas didn't look out of place, which again can help to identify a character mood for viewers / readers that are familiar with the symbolism of japanese manga.

That will most probably not work just as well for your more realistic style. I would theorize, with a big enough character portrait, going a little bit on the strong side with your emotions (an angry character looking VERY angry, and a happy character VERY happy), and limiting the emoticons to just the most important ones and leaving out too much subtelties which might get lost because of the smallness of the icons, you might be able to pull it off.

Of course, this is just my personal preference. If it fits your game IDK.

Actually the link that I posted before was exactly to English translation of the story.

Heh... I feared that would be the case as soon as I posted it. Yeah, silly me, should have checked the link first :P

Will definitely check it out though.