Nice entry, I love art and sound !!

I like the little world you created here, and really accessible gameplay.  Though at first I was confused -- I thought I was supposed to do a puzzle game in the left side to attack the monsters. 

For some ideas on RNG, check out how Tetris has done it over the years:  https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers

I usually use some variation of the "7-bag" to balance things out for all my randomness.

Given the result I'm honestly glad you decided to push this project to the fullest. It really start to come together well once you start getting the more complex shapes into your inventory.

As for the RNG issues with it, you don't necessarily have to guarrantee a wining hand for every monster, you can also add ways to stall out for the time you need to get the right gear, such as sacrificing resources you don't need to block the attack!

Additionally, you can fight off the most frustrating RNG patterns ( I got like 5 ice in a row to an ice immune enemy my first time for example.) by forcing the game to give you a different element every time by remembering the last one dropped. You can also push the game to choose elements that have been rarely dropping. Like by checking if Fire has even been dropped the last 10 times. There are lots of little ways to bias the RNG so that the worst cases don't actually happen like that.

Anyhow, really nice work! I'm happy with my 5800, I hope you keep making games!

Awesome little game! Got two items from a single cycle multiple times, but overall very well made!

A wonderful game with cool styling. It's really cool that you added a tutorial with leaderboards:)

Plays nice, but random nature is unfair - got 7 ice spells in a row against an ice enemy. Lovely artstyle

Really good game! Very polished and well made even for 30(+) hours. This could easily be a mobile game sold on the stores or the like - I hope you develop this game further :)
Also, I'm not sure if my high score was registered :/

polished game, but I only got the same power, never changed. Lots of hours for the jam, but nice concept.

Since you have so many hours sunk already you have to update this to be more balanced, i never could get more than a few items in my inventory without getting hurt on purpose. 

Cool game and deserves another 30 hours invested haha

Very polished and controls were smooth. Timings felt off though as I basically always had to attack immediately with the dug up item, sadly making the strategy of managing inventory and picking items disappear.

First of all I love the fact that you incorporated inventory management as well :) a tie is a tie!

Now the game: it’s super cute, it’s juicy and the main loop is very enjoyable! I did encounter some bugs after a while: some items ended up in a different inventory slot instead of where I wanted to put them down and when I reached 5000 points I couldn’t put down the item from my hand (not even in the bin) even though there was free space for it; but I still enjoyed playing Monster Quest a lot. It’s rare to see something this polished in a TriJam (although you did 10x the suggested time window, but hey, good on you for riding the motivation-wave :).

Even with 30h dev time, one of the best games in this Jam.

Oh, 30 hours, I can tell, haha. It seems like you were preparing your assets for the theme "Inventory management" instead of "dig it up". I've found several glitches when managing the inventory slots, some power ups disappeared, but besides that it's a game that I would really play again. Feels really polished and fun! You also added a tutorial and highscore. Congratulations!