Grunthex

New idea: It would be nice if on the skills screen, clicking on a relationship/dream score would show you where you can get inspirations related to that stat, like you can with stats and skills. Top of the bio, bottom of the bio... I'm not picky!

2 little things: 1) When you're on a location sub-screen, with your 3-5 choice of actions for that location, put somewhere on the screen the NAME of that location. It's annoying to go through the skills menu everytime I want to raise a skill because I don't know where I did the thing I just did. 2) Up with the date on top, put a day of the week! Just a minor flavor things that adds so much. (I did notice the game calendar is accurate to the 1930 calendar. Not that I expected to catch you guys out, but I had to try!)

As a counterpoint to this, keep in mind that succeeding in obstacles will almost always raise primary stats and/or relationship scores, and that raising them makes you more easily able to train your skills to succeed in the future... Also, if there are 2 or more skills to beat an obstacle, the developers are sneaky, and sometimes one way might give you better (or at least different) bonuses than another. It's not common, but it happens! And finally, you can outright skip some obstacles by picking the right conversation choices beforehand. I've had characters beat obstacles for me (and you often get a relationship+ that way too!)

Most inspirations (at least in the early game, can't speak to later) increase 2 stats. So while clicking Moxie in your stats might show you one way to get an inspiration, there may very well be others ... look around!

From a lore standpoint, that comment makes me giddy. From a mechanical one, it makes my brain go all freak-out. There's like 300 Phemes, and you're going to let me MODIFY them? *faint*

Can you put two phemes together in different ways, and come up with a different spell? That is, say your spell goes Fire-Smoke .. is that always the same spell? The reason I ask is purely by chance I noticed today there are two different spells with the same Phemes in the same order. The Glow of Victory spell and the School Conquest spell to be specific.

While I'm not convinced it's necessarily a bad thing (hey, maybe some classes you have to study on your own time to ace!), if it is determined that something is unusual, you might also want to look at Revision Spells, Incantation Spells, Dialectic-First Principles, and Calligraphy-Orthography, which all have the same issue (learning cost of 2, so you usually end up with a considerably lower than average score in that subskill). On the other hand, I believe each of those classes has at least 3 other subskills that are regularly taught in class, so this doesn't actually affect your final grade, as your overall skill should still be where it should be.

One thing I'd really love to see (probably have to wait for year 2), is an easier way to use spells. There are hundreds of them there. Increase this, bump up that, lower the other! But all of them take a full time period to cast, in advance. Given that every other event/adventure has me casting spells on the fly, I'd like to see one of two things. A) A free spell-casting per day. If you do this, set some kind of limits on how many or what types of spells you can have active on you at once (Maybe every spell after the 1st requires a concentration roll, at steadily increasing penalties?) (Preferred) An interface within the event/adventure interface that lets you cast one spell per interface/adventure phase. Have it cost stress, or something, and only last for the duration of the day (or even the event/adventure) if cast this way, and not be modifiable with optional phemes. Another suggestion, for the end-of-day summary. Make it so that all the people I have info on/in my clique don't show me their whole schedule unless I expand it. Scrolling past 10 of these daily to keep an eye on the merit scores gets annoying. Or heck, make a quick All-Down button so I can see the Merit scores easier. Or make a main screen button (like the Calendar/Inventory buttons?) where I can see the merit scores (bonus points if it's a cute little graphical shot of the Fios Fragi flowers, and the College colors of the last Merit winners!)