Interesting story, but the battles felt like they didn't matter and were just there as a time sink. The controls felt a little laggy when moving (you just tap and it only turns up in that direction) so this made the highway scene a little frantic.

Suggestion: I wasn’t a fan of the input lag for directions, and would have much rather preferred being able to turn and move in that direction as soon as I hit the key to do so. The enemies were far too ‘spongy’ (too much HP) and gave little reason to actually fight them (no items or money or experience).

It's pretty interesting I get to play as a discarded toy. I would suggest renaming her though, since Loli Doll does have some unfortunate implications. You could even let the player name her if you want to.

Controls does feel a little weird (having to keep pressing to move), but I assume you changed it for the crossing the road puzzle. If possible I'd suggest going to normal controls for the forest and the dump and switching to the current for the road map.

Regarding the battles, in the very first one I encountered there were a lot of "Miss"es, plus it took quite some time before the action bar was filled up, which made it feel super slow. So I did my very best to avoid battles as much as I could. I agree with below suggestions to change it to 'wait' instead of 'active'. I was also a bit disappointed that Guarding gave so little Power, so I just stopped using that. 

Looking forward to seeing where the story is going ^^

You should place your autosaves to be after the cutscenes instead of before. Might be nice to add save at will options.

Please add warnings that you can't backtrack.

Control was annoying. You click once to turn, but you need to hold the controls down to actually move.

Kind of annoying to only be able to read skills in battle, especially since you have an active system, so enemies can attack while you wait.

A cutscene says Energy for the battery, but the in-game is Power.

Turns and TP takes a long time to charge. Feels like you need to use the TP defend skill every battle to really have a chance and it just takes a while. 

The berserk (without an r) skill seems somewhat necessary if you want to recharge, but is relatively useless if you just want to finish the fight. Definitely could use a speed up. The evasion skill also seems relatively useless.

Battles were kind of annoying. No loot and take extra time to beat. If you die due to some enemy you didn't see (like the boar that instant kills you on one path), you have to start all over from before the cutscene of that level.

The river crossing cutscene only works one way.

Feels kind of weird not having a name when usually people name their dolls. Unless their name is literally Loli Doll.

Pathing was a bit of a pain and a bit unintuitive in the forest area.

The default scroll text speed is too slow, but good job including the option to adjust that manually. I think it could be defaulted to a bit quicker scroll speed though because I have to hit the action button for every new scroll text as I find myself waiting for the text to appear. 

The music feels a little of out place in some areas, but it's not terrible.

The combat system itself feels very slow and clunky, but I do like the battle backgrounds. I'd recommend making the ATB quicker and make it wait instead of active. This may sound counter intuitive, but it's not and here's why... 

The way it is now (on active) it goes like this: 

The action bars for both the enemy and player fill up very slowly, then when the player's fills up, a window pops up for you to input your commands, but when the enemies' bars fill up they immediately select an action and go. So if you just increase the ATB speed the game will effectively get harder and it would effect the feel and balance of the game in the wrong direction. 

Instead you need to set it to 'Wait-style ATB' and then when the player's bar fills up the enemies ATB bar will freeze where it's at and give the player time to input their commands with all the time they need in the world to strategize. When they do, the bars will fill up quickly (because you increase the speed of the ATB). This will net a much smoother and better combat system. Right now it's a slog and frankly just really bad.

Quit blueballin' the player with empty treasure chests. People get fed up with that real quick.

You gain TP too slow. You can use a plugin to add your own TP modes, I would suggest you add a new mode that gives more TP. Maybe gain TP when you hit an enemy and when you're hit by an enemy. Double it across the board and allow getting hit to also increase your TP. (Kind of like quadrupling the overall amount).

Guarding should restore HP and MP, because only giving 2 MP is just not enough. Have it give like 20HP and 10MP. 

You don't get the option to run from combat, the fights take FOREVER and you can't even heal by using items or guarding or anything. 

Why can't we save the game? You should allow players to save when they want as long as it doesn't effect the game in a way that would cause a soft lock.

The battle system is completely imbalanced and unfortunately you spend 90% of your time in a combat with creatures. The owl's moves are way over powered. There are just so many things wrong with this.

When you die, because you WILL die eventually, the game will restart from the last save point, and sometimes that's the beginning of the game. Forcing you to replay the slow and painful battles up until the last save point.

Supposedly the game has an autosave feature, which to the best of my knowledge it should save when you do a transfer map event. But it didn't save for me when I switched to the second map and it also doesn't save after the battles. So I don't see ANY save features here.  

Nice try, but I'm afraid that you've severely missed the mark on this project. Better luck next time. Thanks for entering the competition and I hope that you've learned some new skills from this whole process.

First of all, once again, thank you for playing my entry. I played this one and I will honestly say I enjoyed it okay but my main suggestion to you is to make the battles significantly shorter. I thought the story sounded intriguing but in my honest opinion, a game's first few enemies shouldn't take 6-8 turns to get through. I think the battles were interesting enough but way too long! And not because you used the timer turn based system but more or so the enemies have too much health when you are only doing 1-4 damage half the time. 

Because I'm doing so little damage I became very reliant on skills. I noticed you gained a little power through guarding. I would suggest to help balance things a little... since there are little batteries in the game at the start, make it 10 power regained instead of 2 when you guard.

Also, the save menu being disabled kinda threw me off. I read that it autosaves automatically but to be honest, most people are going to also want to save and load files manually so I'd recommend putting that back in and have players rely on autosave only if they need it.

Overall, I think the game has potential and I enjoyed playing it but it definitely needs some pacing improvements. Great job and good luck!