gonna come back to edit this later tomorrow if I have time to play more, but these are my first impressions from playing for a while.
1. It's beautiful, hong is an incredible artist and it really shines here in this game more than any before it imo, the colour palette was a great choice as well.
2. it's huge in terms of it's mechanics. shop, inventory, betting, combat, roguelike upgrades. it's very impressive.
3. the combat just really isn't much fun. I'm assuming mostly at the start of the game because that's where I am. It's just really boring to walk around in a circle and clicking to shoot the harpoon gun at a bunch of enemies with way too much health for a game where health isn't displayed. the dash is nice but doesn't really make combat much more interesting.
the enemies don't telegraph attacks very well at all. nothing draws attention to them when they're about to attack other than the really subtle squish on the swordfish from what I've seen so far. that makes the combat really frustrating and feel unfair. what I like to do especially with a dashing enemy is to start them animating really fast between two squashed frames before dashing to draw attention to itself. flashing red works for that kind of thing too if you don't want to spend a lot more time on animation.
there's not much feedback for hitting or killing enemies either, no hit flash, really weak sound, and the way they fly off the boat when they die is just strange and unsatisfying. (pretty distracting as well)
hit flash + shaking or knockback and a juicier sound would do a ton. And for the death animation, it would look a lot better if the enemies flew off in the direction they were last attacked, in Marigold I do this with the blood splatter by having damaging objects send their last contacted object their rotation for the enemy to store until they die/are hit by something else. I have no doubt you could come up with an even better way to do this (and then tell me)
+it would be cooool if the fish changed in size when flying off the boat so it looks like they're going up in the air otherwise I think the enemies just flying off screen with gravity like DKC/some of my games would look great too.
sorry for the wall of text. this is a very impressive game but I really think you guys need to start scaling these big games and maybe these big teams back a bit for the flowjams. you guys are really smart and skilled at this stuff but it's usually a bit too much and you really could make some incredible stuff at a smaller scale. I think Gods of five is just about perfect tbh, you struck gold there once it was all fixed up.