{Not A Proper Review} Galactic Star Tournament

"Galactic Star Tournament" by CountBleck

Another review that is not quite up to snuff. I felt like I had given the game enough time before a bug killed it for me and the fact that I did not really want to go back told me that I had formed my opinion. So what you get is my impression of the time I did spend with "Galactic Star Tournament". It may be that some of the confusion would have cleared itself up later. Also, some spoilers  may be present.

Story
So you are... a warrior? At least you are deemed important enough to be brought to the Galactic Star Tournament by Magic John Hammond and his minotaur bodyguard. In the course of the tournament, he switches between villain and not villain. He has powerful enemies and... that's as far as I got.
I was taken aback by some strange logic, but since the actual content of the conversation turned out to be a bunch of lies later on, I can't fault the game for that.
There are some strange things though. In a team-up fight I was expecting some help from another character, but they just stood around twiddling their thumbs and consuming the good magic-deep-space-air.
The writing on the whole was not my cup of tea, since I felt that it leaned heavily on the exposition and there is something about the tone I can't quite put my finger on.

Mechanics
The approach to combat is interesting. The tournament is divided into three rounds, one for training and one for fighting your opponents. In the training round, you fight two enemies that are randomly picked from three different types with different strengths and immunities.
An interesting mechanic is that the stronger melee attack leaves you more vulnerable to attacks. So you start weighing the benefits of more damage dealt against the drawbacks of the enemies hitting your harder.
After each fight, you choose to either fight another round with your current HP or go on to meet your actual opponent.
The tutorial told me that there was a dodge button for those with good timing. This is a category of people I definitely don't belong to, so my brain deleted that information quickly.
Other commenters said they liked the magic system, but I didn't manage to find it. I bought an ice rune and a health upgrade from the points earned in my first training fight. My HP stayed the same and I probably had to combine the ice rune with something.
So, taking into consideration my ineptitude with the upgrade system, my dodging-amnesia and a possible health-eating bug, can you guess what happened in my first fight? The one against the opponent the game portrayed as an amoral, incompetent idiot? He wiped the floor with me, right, get yourself a cookie.
That's when I realised that "Galactic Star Tournament" takes the roguelike approach to death. You die, you start over. So I sped through the exposition once more, hitting my space bar like it owed me money. It took me a while that I was still hitting it on the naming screen. And so began the adventures of "AAAA", a name that promises more excellence than would actually be delivered.
Since the upgrade system and me were not destined to be frienst, I just stocked up on carrots and waltzed through the tournament like Baby Hermann at the beginning of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - blissfully ignorant of all danger and, against all odds, still alive at the end.
I kind-of-defeated two bosses, before I was told to enter a portal and found myself in exposition country again, back before the first level. For a moment, I was considering a time-loop, a narrative device. But when characters started addressing the empty air where my character had been when the scene had played out the first time around, the dial in my head turned to "bug".

Presentation
One thing I noticed is that the characters walk around an awful lot to deliver their lines. Sometimes this happens in quite heated conversations too. It looks odd when someone angrily addresses somebody else from across the room, then takes three seconds to walk up to them, only to yell in their face on arrival.
The Game Maker aesthetic is certainly present, but there is original art here, an effort I appreciate. And while the minotaur looked a bit muddy to me, it served its purpose and looked at home in the setting. Also, I should not be throwing stones as far as art is concerned. Lob pebbles maybe. Small ones. Very carefully.

On the whole...
Am I missing something? Possibly. Probably. Is it the game's fault? Not entirely. Chances are that, not being a player of RPGM games, I am probably oblivious to some kind of mechanic any one RPGM-afficionado could pull off in their sleep.
The writing? No accounting for taste. The battle system? That's part preference, part incompetence on my part.
As I said, this is not fair, professional or in-depth enough to be called a review, it's just my impressions. But summing up, I have to say "Galactic Star Tournament", just did nothing for me.
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Link: http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/572#.Vdi8DvntlBc

Dev: CountBleck

Time Played: 20 minutes

Got My Vote? No. I didn't understand the game, the game didn't understand me, and I suspect it threw me the possible time-travel-bug as an excuse for us to politely go our separate ways.