I enjoyed the demo. Lots of fun quests and places to explore. I liked that many of the monsters were owls, since they are not your average RPG monster. I guess the ultimate goal of the game will be to find and eradicate the source of the monsters? 

Had a harder time staying alive at the beginning because I did not realize the person in the closed off area was a shop I could buy herbs and improved gear from.  Adding a shop sign and maybe signs for the heal/save locations could help. Finally, -ca-ching!- sound effect for the store after purchases would make them more satisfying.

Hello! I was one of the streamers who took part in Feedback Quest, and I'm here to leave some comments I had while playing.

... bro. Can I call you bro? Listen up. I love RPGs. They were my bread and butter in my teenage years. When I realized there was a turn based RPG in this jam, I was excited. Your game did NOT disappoint me. That said, there is absolutely a lot of things that can be done to improve this game and give it more polish for when you get more of it built.

To start, at this time you list Health and Max Health as separate entities. You also do this for Magic and Max Magic. However, it would be far easier to put these on the same line and simply add a slash to make them look like this:

Health: 15/20
Magic: 5/8

Where the value on the left is your current health or magic, while the value on the right is your max. This is how turn based RPGs do it, and it would reduce the amount of stuff you need to display while giving the same information.

Currently, you have it set up that the button to open the menu is the same button to confirm choices. However, this can result in someone accidentally opening the menu after coming out of a fight if they're just spamming attacks to get through the fight quickly. I would recommend making the keybind for the menu be its own key.

Equipping items is awkward. The system you use is to do it through the Items category in the menu. What I would recommend is to do it through the Equipment category; you choose Equipment, you choose the slot you want to change, and then you're giving a menu of only items that can be equipped in that slot. You then confirm your choice and will automatically go back to the Equipment category where you can choose another slot to change or exit.

While I know you still are working on this, I would like to suggest adding a bob to the boat while in motion. When I was using the boat but couldn't see land, there were times I couldn't tell if I was even moving because the water effect you put up shrouded the pixels. A bobbing animation on the boat only when moving would correct this.

Finally, there is no flair to fights. As such, they're not visually interesting. Since the style of your game is virtually the same as the original Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior game, I would say to look at that for ideas (some things they do is they write text out line by line instead of just dropping all of it, they shake the screen during attacks, they add backgrounds behind enemies).

I want to see more. GIB ME MORE OR I WILL FIND YOU.

I love old games :) I managed to make it to the end of the demo, fun quick combat that is mashable, was easy to learn and pick up, didn't take long to grind. The gameplay loop is fun, the graphics are nice. Some assets don't entirely match up but I really like the monster sprites. I think a different button for the menu would also be handy as I'd keep opening it after every fight due to it being the accept key. Otherwise, really fun game with all the difficulty spikes I would expect for a game this nature, but not frustratingly so. Well done and keep it up :)