Her name is Melony, she likes to commit...

I think this is the first complete entry I've played. It's polished, complete, and the length is about right for a jam game. It was pretty good!

I enjoyed the battles. It's pretty stock standard RPG Maker, but the abilities are set up well and the progression is solid. I think if the game were much longer it would get tired, but it's balanced and set up about right to keep things interesting for the length of the game. I did sometimes find it hard to keep track of all the characters, their abilities, strengths and weaknesses.

I wish we'd had at least one free-roaming section, but that would probably have been pushing it on scope.

The art ranged from very good to kinda bad, and the inconsistency alone was really jarring. In general the character portraits were really good, the battlers pretty ugly, and the environment art somewhere in between. It looks like almost everyone involved did some art, so that's probably why.

The story was okay. The game isn't that long, and there are loads of characters, which made it hard to get a good feel for any of them. I found it pretty cliched, and the romance was poorly done. With that being said, it was interesting enough to keep me engaged and invested until the end.

If there ever is a sequel, I'd be interested in playing that one too.

This game has such a great Sailor Moon vibe! I really enjoyed the party of characters and 90s magical girl feel.

Graphically, the art was good overall. I really liked the character portraits and full-screen art pages. The sprites were a bit of a mixed bag. A lot of the background elements were pretty good. The characters sprites had personality, but maybe not the fidelity of the rest of the graphics. In fact, my biggest critique about the in-game graphics would probably be that there were a lot of different styles/resolutions mixed together: Cartoon-y outlines on some things, anti-aliasing on other sprites. The fountain during the water creature battle was another good example.. it seemed like low-res pixel art stretched bigger than it should have been, especially compared to the other elements around it. BUT despite those critiques, I do think the game has a pretty good look and feel overall! Making things a little more consistent would just take it to the next level!

Gameplay wise, I thought it all worked well! The combat felt meaningful and strategic, and kept me thinking without being too hard.

I did however run into one probably that has at least temporarily stalled me. This game is decently long, and I had to take a little break. (I was at the Sudoku puzzle) No prob, I had several saves... I was playing in browser, but usually this is fine. Unfortunately, when I try to start the game up again I get an error: "Error - TypeError: Not in fullscreen mode"  I can't even start a new game, as it doesn't get to the title screen at all.

I'll probably need to play in another browser or download the desktop version to continue. I do want to see the full game, but I'll have to come back to it later as I still have many entries to try, but not as much free time as I'd like.

Even with this setback, I enjoyed what I played a lot. I think this is a really good Magical Girl RPG with a lot of content! Great work!

It all came together very seamlessly. The blend of turn-based and visual novel was a nice surprise. Great voice work and illustrations. I do like how there were very detailed illustrations along with the tiny RPG view. If I had a gripe I would say to draw the tiny versions so they look more like their illustrated counterparts. Love the animations too. 

This game oozes magical girl feel. So far, this is the most magical girl game I’ve played. It reminds me of Winx Club more than anything, even the writing. There is a ton of content, and I wouldn’t even imagine that this could be done in a month. The graphics are great at times, mainly portraits, cutscenes but not so good in the overworld - and I don’t mean all the overworld sprites, some are actually done pretty well, like Varien’s house, the furniture and all, but some others are not, it’s inconsistent. As a whole, I think it’s still pretty nice and the game is highly polished. I don’t mind if this is described as a full game rather than a game jam game.

The combat is pretty fun, with nice effects, animations, sounds and everything. The attacks and turn-based mechanics are simple and standard, there’s nothing unique about it but the effort behind the animations and effects made it all the more enjoyable to play. Turn-based aside, I didn’t feel like I was choosing any routes or at the very least the game wasn’t letting me as the player talk to the guy that my character likes, i.e. the romance part was not integrated with the gameplay, it is already part of the story, like reading a book. Even if there was a single route/guy, if I had the choice to interact with him in my own way, compliment him or be shy with him or anything, that would satisfy my expectations for the Ren’ai mashup. With that said, there is some love interaction and I appreciate that. In essence, this is a standard turn-based RPG-like game, like the older Final Fantasy games.

I completed the game and at the end fight, somehow Kisa and Flora is invincible to the Queen’s attacks, so I was able to just push through even though everyone’s supposed to be dead; I’m not sure if this is intended or if it is a bug. The night sky overlay is quite dark which makes it hard to see the effects and text sometimes, tone it down a bit. And no Sudoku… please… I was worried if I had to beat someone at chess next. Maybe add an option to skip mini-games, and if you want you can even include bad consequences along with it to flesh out the story, at least there’s some player choice.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with Elemental Guardians and it’s a wonderful experience. I am very impressed at how much the game has to offer with only a month of development time. Excellent work!

Oookay let's see... I played this game to finish... it was long :'D

I like the main story. That's a very interesting start; a reverse isekai I might say, I love that concept. It certainly can be made better but I think for something made in just a month it's okay XP

What is commendable is the amount of content you fit into this game in just one month. That's one long story with a lot of features; must have been a ton of hard work.

In general I also like the turn-based combats. The balance is towards the easy spectrum but more or less it's not too easy and I still had to think to play this game.

The character arts are also pretty good... for the portraits and cutscenes anyway they are impressive.

I however, have a great deal of criticism for this game:

• A lot of content is impressive; however, perhaps it is exactly due to the huge amount of content and features existing in this game that it lacks polish. It seems to me because the content is so huge, not enough time was done to polish each and every part of this game.
  • The sprites for one need some improvements. It is not the biggest problem however; the biggest problem is the inconsistent artstyle existing in this game. Some parts of this game use pixel arts while other parts are less pixel-artsy; and for the pixel arts their pixel sizes are inconsistent.
• While I did say the story is okay, it can also have some polishing. I'm not really a good writer myself so I can't give any advices, but there are moments where I felt the story is somewhat all over the place, unnatural, sudden, etc. For example, Melony's internal struggle of confidence and leadership; it was only brought in the beginning but never mentioned anymore in the second half; almost like that thing was forgotten.
• Perhaps I should've clarified this better; but what you have here is a turn-based combat game with a romantic subtext in the story; not really ren'ai game which is defined as a game where the primary goal of the game is to establish a (romantic) relationship between the Player Character and one or more of the NPCs as defined in TVTropes, or as an alternate looser criteria for this jam defined as games with routes for relationships with characters (which include single route games as to include all games that should fit the TVTropes definition) -- this game is not either of those; the relationship is not in the mechanics of this game and felt like a side story. I do realize however, that your team definitely was trying to fulfill the genre, and perhaps simply misunderstood as to what fulfills the Ren'ai genre for the purpose of this jam; for that reason I'm not going to remove this game. What I cannot do however, is to give a high rating for the genre mashup category to this game... for that I'm sorry.

Well done game = ] 

Good:  Flying kicks to the face, first time I used the attack I LOL'd and other attacks are pretty cool. 

Bad: I think the story is good enough, but maybe a bit on the boring side. Fights get sort of long.