The trollface boss's gimmick was interesting, but the later ones're annoying because they pretty much negate whole builds (such as my crit-heavy dodge-heavy build suddenly running face first into a boss that completely denies those things, or the psy damage nerfing boss). Also, there's next to no strategy and while you can influence the odds of battles with your build and setup it still comes down too heavily to luck for my tastes. I don't know why so many flash games have automatic, uncontrollable battles. They take a lot of the fun out of it. This at least does more to keep you engaged, but the implementation of even that is problematic. Because you need two to activate a buff, you never know what might come up next and it's too random. And the occasional double hit where you have to match the numbers or colors has too short a timer and turning it into a complete miss is far more frustrating than games with similar mechanisms where it still does a regular hit if you miss the timing.
Another tip, if like me you got to the final battle without completing all the "build 20 splash damage units" etc. awards, you can just start a battle, build the units you need for the award until you run out of gold, and then restart. The final battle gives you the most gold for this. Using this, I was able to unlock the bonus battle without replaying through entire battles.
Okay, for those having trouble with the temple of healing, ignore the rear. Just concentrate your forces at the front. My mistake was starting with the swordsmen at the back, not the front. Just put one swordsmen group at the front, fully upgrade them, and concentrate two groups each of mages and archers there as well (don't forget to upgrade them to deal with the flying enemies). Everything will die without getting past the front.
A tip for people having trouble with necromancers: try putting a group of swordsmen right by the entrance where they come in. Especially when fully upgraded, they make pretty quick work of the necromancers and their skeletons, and you don't have to deal with the ranged units' poor targeting priorities.
Not only that, but the horseback bandits' forcing you forward gives you less time to react to said obstacles, and if you hold the jump button a little too long, you jump right again after you jump over a ledge, missing the timing to avoid the next obstacle. A combination of all those little aggravations made the riding sequence not very fun.
It's got some amusing deaths and some fun humor, but the horse riding segment drags on far too long and those trees blocking your sight forces a lot of tedious repetition due to obstacles you missed seeing.
Fairly mediocre story (with cheesy dialogue from the villain), hard to see items, and non-intuitive plot triggers (most particularly the one in the restroom after seeing the boss).
Regarding the hero balance, from what I can tell it comes down to one very simple thing: the wizard has ranged attacks and the other two don't. This is a huge advantage for the wizard. Overall the balance disparity would be far, far less noticeable if all of the heroes had ranged attacks. For example, throwing axes or horseback archery.
Compared to the sorceress, the other two heroes're pretty damn awful. They keep nearly dying even with guards on support while the sorceress sits on a full HP while nearly alone. Why does the sorceress get HP regen she doesn't need on her gear while the other heroes get nothing of the sort?
I see I'm not the only one who noticed that the face graphics were from RPG Maker VX (leading some people who don't know that much about Flash to mistakenly assume you uploaded a RPGMaker game). The claim that you drew them yourself is pretty unbelievable as you would've had to pretty much trace it pixel-by-pixel to do that. It looks more like you took them and converted directly into a more pixelated form.
Also, while you acknowledge basing your tiles off Zelda... There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration, but this goes beyond inspiration and straight into derivative work territory. You could've definitely done far more to differentiate your own work. For example, the tree sprites are identical.
I'd like this game more if I had more choices for heroines than 'scantily clad and busty'. You might want to consider what kind of appeal that has to a female audience.
Could you include details about the game in your description? It doesn't really tell you anything about the game itself, just that you made it for a competition.
For those having trouble with the Fire Hero level, remember that your objective's to get the token, not to beat the other two tribes. Focus on building up and rushing to the token instead of trying to fight the enemies. The level's not really set up so that you can win by force.
Agreed on the Fire Hero level being a very sharp and abrupt increase in difficulty over the previous levels which were so easy that they gave very little opportunity to learn skills to deal with this kind of difficulty. The first eighteen levels you could virtually get through by flattening all the land within sight of your people and doing little else. That difficulty increase combined with the outdated controls makes for a more frustrating experience. Populous was a very good game for its time, but this imitation inherits some of the more awkward control and interface elements. Things like the lack of zooming, awkward isometric controls, and so on.
I finished a lot of the levels just by terraforming so that my people would get a bunch of high-powered fortresses. Often, I didn't even end up using a single spell. The advice at the beginning of one of the levels said to quickly get my people away, but I pretty much crushed them just by terraforming a bunch of flat terrain for my people and then doing an attack rush. In short, fun, but not much strategy to this. It's been rare so far that I've had to actually use a spell.
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Maybe I will change the wife into a cat or something more unisex.