No items? No recovery after battle? I can't continue with such condition like that. Unless the player good enough in this game but for me, I'm just casual player.

I like the opening scene. Nice and custom title art, the song choice is good even though it's very familiar. Is this default? A re-make? Not sure but it's both familiar and different. Maybe it's a default slowed down? Anyway, the options are plentiful and I appreciate you letting me pick my font and sound files.

The menu is simplified and the music in the first scene is good. Thank you for including chain, the duck that heals the party for free. The default attack has been removed and replaced with sets of skills and the battle numbers are very low digit. I like these changes. 

The walking sprites and enemy game scene sprites are all customized and super cute. The enemy battlers look hand drawn, but maybe they're from a DLC pack, I'm not sure but they work in the game.

The battle system is pretty simple to understand, but not that interesting. It's a first person battle system with very few skills. All of which use built in animations and sounds.

The maps are not really that impressive or interesting, but they serve their purpose I suppose. The story is super weird and hard to follow. It feels like I turned on Crunchy Roll* and found a random anime that was in the middle of the season and just started watching. 

*: Crunchy Roll is an online television service like Netflix, but it has a very large selection of cartoons and Anime.

Side note if you do include a character that's smoking a cigarette you will have to label it with the ESRB when publishing to some platforms.

You should adjust the blow smoke puzzle to reset the stars if the player blows smoke out of order. That wouldn't be too challenging since there are only four stars. The way it is now is stupidly easy, even for a person who is not a fan of hard puzzles.

The battles are not really balanced right as you get into the ship. No matter what you do, unless you just get lucky with RNG your characters are going to die. You can only flash once without running out of MP, (Flash should be an AOE that stops them from attacking if you can only use it once or twice).

The acid doesn't really seem to help much, maybe have it also deal a little damage.

The numbers are just a bit off, maybe increase the player's max HP a bit and you'll be in a better place.

Another thing you could do in-between combats is revive any characters that died. Maybe just give them 1HP because the way it is, starting them dead and locking the battles to the story, means some people won't be able to win at some points. Thus soft-locking their save file.

At some point we get a 4th party member but then right as the next fight happens, she just disappears? Not sure why she doesn't join us in combat. That would have made the balance a bit better.

Every time that you go back to the inn you have to read through that NPC's dialog again. I think you're missing a page turn in here. That should happen because you have to go back to the inn constantly.

Every screen transition into the next area you have all the followers clipping through the wall and it looks bad, but it's a small thing.

There needs to be a heal spot in the next area. In case you just guess bad. Four stars and three chances. If you pick the wrong ones you get attacked, if characters die then you can soft lock in some situations. 

The puzzles are not even puzzles, they're just guessing games. Not fun really. Now I'm stuck too.

Too many dead party members and I keep failing all the guessing games.

Overall it's not the worst experience I've had in this jam. I like the custom bust art and there's plenty of it. The music is picked decently, the sounds are fine, but the battle system is weak and not really fleshed out. The puzzles are not puzzles, they're poorly designed guessing games. I think the story and art may carry this title, but without an overhaul of the actual gameplay I'm not sure how far it will go.

Good job submitting a project for this game jam, I hope that you've leveled up your developing skills in the process and I look forward to the next thing you produce. :)

Great indie title! This game is really catchy, I feel like you could take these characters and make a whole series of games from them. I also felt everything was pretty well balanced between puzzles and combat. I really enjoyed playing it!

This one  is tough for me to rate/comment on. I loved the artwork and the premise. I thought the puzzles were decent with a nice mechanic. But the puzzles were easy, seemed to be based on trial and error, and were mostly cool from a developer standpoint. Since they were fairly easy, there's no reason to have a way to back out of them, but that would have been nice. The characters... seem like they were part of a long-running series that I'm dropping in on in the middle. Is that the case? I could barely keep straight who anyone was or what their relationships were, and rather than seem charming they mostly were just annoying. The lack of restorative items wasn't a big deal, but I definitely used the bed several times because otherwise at least one person would die to the guards (without healing between battles), which meant watching the dialogue cutscene over again and again. I think if I knew who the characters were, this might have been a more enjoyable game, but I had a hard time getting into it as it was. I also got several errors playing the game, but thankfully just clicking past them kept the game going. So overall it wasn't a bad game or anything, in fact it was pretty good, but the simplicity of the gameplay coupled with that feeling of confusion over the characters made it tough to really enjoy.

I played through your game and here's some comments and feedback:

• Giant enemy crabs? Sony needs to fund this project for the PS5
• Custom artwork was nice and well made!
• The star puzzle was relatively easy. If it reset when the player made a mistake, it would have been better as a short memory game
• I like the diversity in the cast and how unique they look. Unfortunately, that's also a weakness because I feel like there are too many characters to develop them all within a short playthrough would be difficult
• One huge problem: I can't go past Cell Block 2 because my party wasn't fully healed. So with Natsumi dead and my other 2 party members with only 4 HP each, there's literally no way to beat the two Alien Guards. Unfortunately, with my save file leading to the same cutscene, this is where I had to stop playing.

Good job with the game!

Hi Kv!! VaroClaw here. Loved  the custom art and diversity of the characters. Also, the simplicity (not having to menu or worry about EXP) was a refresher for me. Couldn't finish it cause I got stuck on the room where you need to trap the guards, felt a bit unfair to guess the correct order of the stars. 

Cool entry!!

Really nice straight-forward plot, although I don't understand the story myself. It is really thought out with the art style and design. Also the amount of diverse and unique characters is really awesome.