Hey, thanks for setting some time aside to play and leave feedback for 18-28-38-48.
You see, I'm doing a lot of things simultaneously. System design. Programming. The manual. The tie-in novel. More recently, the future in-game quests and the logic that will govern them. My forecast is that, just as the various aspects of the project are in a similar state of incompleteness at the moment, at a certain point I can expect them to reach shipshape at about the same time as well. I hope.
Re: BAD – well, my main target audience is an intersection between hardcore JRPG enthusiasts who wouldn't mind even if the game were nothing but menus and combat (like Medarot Parts Collection, Mega Man Battle Chip GP or Pokémon Stadium) and TTRPG/board game players who'd like to try something different with their table. But more than a love letter to JRPGs, I want the project to act as some kind of apologetics for the genre too. Yeah, my vision is to have each player spend a lot of time on the battle screen (currently, other than fights, you can also encounter resources and treasure) but also to make it worth the while being there. Of course, as development advances, I hope to add more map events, questlines, characters you can introduce to each other and watch as they interact, and a dungeon-crawling mode that lets you explore the entire planet in first person (representing the basic world surface would take only 70 MB with .txt files; I ran the numbers before). For a miniature Planet Earth, there's plenty of inspiration available to fill in this world :D
Keep in mind that multiplayer is supposed to be a huge chunk of the experience, so, maybe...
Re: UGLY – yup, sorry, the battle system really isn't exactly in its golden age right now. Once the basic game engine is working more or less perfectly, I expect development time to be spent almost exclusively on it. My vision is to have an overwhelming amount of build options available and directly reward the players that try the most obscure ones out. There's a lot to learn from games with well-received combat in other genres too, such as the fatal hits and intuitive tells in FromSoftware action games. Translating these into a turn-based format is a challenge I'm taking up. In that regard, the manual and spreadsheet are sort of a manifesto of what's to come ;)
Thanks again for the sincere feedback; I can't go on without people like you. I'm just a lone man devving as a JOBBY in my spare time, but this is my passion project, on which I expect to work for the rest of my life. It's a slow ride, and I'm taking it easy; so, my plans could well be a couple of years away from implementation. Who knows if it will take me until 2028 or 2038 to finish the game? 2048, maybe? Time will tell