A faithful sequel to the original. It does a good job of fitting all the traditional J-rpg battle mechanics into a nice battle gauntlet.
First I want to talk about the art. Its a little rough around the edges and some UI pieces don't quite fit the art style. That being said the focus of the game is on the characters and they all fit very nicely together and have that old school flash look to them which works well here. And even when some characters were partly reused, they would have some sort of change to keep them unique, so I have no issue with it.
As for the audio, I think the music fit very well and didn't feel to repetitive. Due to the "retro" gameplay the lack of sound effects isn't as noticeable, but I do think some sound effects could have helped make the game feel a bit more alive. Just some simple attack and hurt effects that would play when you do certain actions.
Last I want to go into the actual gameplay. While it took me a few attempts to really get some progress, once I understood the game and had a strategy it was fun for awhile. I like how every button served a purpose and felt actually useful (except the "Win" button. I assume it did nothing the whole game, but if I missed some secret oh well).
At first I was skeptical if the "-1" in a stat really had much impact on gameplay, but eventually I realized how big of a difference the one point made over time. It made finding the right stat to nerf a fun puzzle, but once I figured it out it was pretty straightforward.
The games balance was a bit on the hard side, but it had a good pace and didn't ever feel impossible. You also showed a good amount of information to the player, which helped us make decisions rather than guessing at random each fight. And while it's not a huge issue, I do wish I could see the strength stat of an enemy to estimate how hard they would hit. Some fights would end with me getting 2 shot from full health the first time I saw an enemy because I didn't realize they would hit much harder than others at similar stages.
My only major complaint with the gameplay is that it drags on a for to long. The gameplay is fun, but not deep enough for the number of fights. Enemy's don't have unique mechanics or attacks that keep each battle fresh. And the lack of any checkpoints makes death very punishing once I get far in. I was hoping to see if there was something at the end, but after losing to the computer virus enemy I just couldn't bring myself to grind up to that point again.
Overall I think this is a solid entry and fairly complete J-rpg battle simulator. I apologize if this review was a bit much, but I'm doing this to all the games from this jam as I think critiques help us grow.