Hi there!
I'm one of the 6 judges for this RPG Maker Game Jam 2025. I was one of the 2 judges assigned to your game, and we have been assigned to rate your games according to each metric highlighted on the game's main jam page, and submit these ratings to the organisers, who will then appropriate what happens with that. Please contact them in the Q&A if you have any further questions about the judging process. The judges will work on different time schedules, so even if I may have finished playing your game, the entire process might not be finished as of yet. Many of these reviews I am posting while still judging.
All that aside, I'd like to share my VOD of me playing your game, which contains up to an hour of gameplay, and some final thoughts at the end! Depending on whether I stopped the VOD early or not, it will also contain many of the thoughts that I say to you below, which may cause repetition. So just be aware of that.
I will also attach a review below this VOD. I will not disclose my ratings for each category as of yet, but those will be revealed in due time. Not all judges are required to post a review or VOD to each game, but many will do so even if it's optional, including myself.
Here's the VOD:
I played your game "Bubbles of Reality", and it was quite impressive indeed! There's a good balance of gameplay - puzzles, battles, etc. - that none of them were necessarily trivial but they were also not too hard. The setup was interesting, and had an unexpected twist, which sort of started to introduce and develop the "Beyond Expectations" theme in a good way. The battles had a good amount of skills and party members, even if I did end up just relying on the magic girl who did the "magic damage all" type spell, and that ended being a bit OP in my run.The game had a great intro, and helped me to care about the characters. It reminded me of some great slice of life light novels I've played before, and it had great characterisation. I was almost sad to later discover that much of it was set in the plant world, because I wanted to sort of hang with the characters at the beginning, but the gameplay in the plant world was solid enough.
It was quite "Beyond Expectations" (lol) to descend into the plant world RPG. I liked that.
I didn't get to play into the pizza minigame, because my 1 hour of time ran out just as I got to the pizza, but that just speaks into how involved the RPG section of the game was. It's actually a lot bigger than I thought it'd be.
The game wasn't too difficult to become frustrating, but it did get kind of repetitive after a while. I think there were around 20-30 battles, and they utilised much of the same techniques. Many of the enemies were similar to each other, and part of me yearned for a little bit more strategy to be required in the battles. But once we got to the final weed-eating boss battle, that battle in particular was quite fun because we got to use a lot of the different techniques in tandem. So I quite liked that boss battle.
Visually, much of the game uses RTP-looking tilesets, but the mapping was quite good indeed, the menus were polished and all of the presentation was very acceptable to a T, especially for a jam game like this. Maybe it didn't entirely blow me away, visually and audially speaking, but it was very good throughout, with well-polished systems that elevated the whole thing with its consistency in polish.
Overall, I think this game was definitely one of the better games in this jam. Solid throughout, with a great deal of polish, even if the gameplay's structure and story structure began to get a bit repetitive, particularly with the same enemies. I would have liked to get to know the slice of life characters more, or at least some other characters. I think it would have elevated the gameplay, which was solid but used many of the same encounters. I think in general, though, this game excels more than most games because of its polish.
Keep making awesome games! I appreciate this one greatly, and I hope to see more games from you! :D