I had fun playing this game! I really loved the battles, especially all the visuals for them, it looked and felt great! Reminded me a lot of Earthbound. The sound and music was good too. I also really loved the ending :)
Some feedback if y'all continue to work on this:
- Felt a little lost having 'half' the key, but realized there wasn't really that many different things I could interact with so eventually got around to what I needed to do.
- The starts and ends to battles feel a little jarring--I'm sure you know this, but definitely adding some start/end sequence to them would be a very strong addition to prioritize as you update the game for overall feel.
- It seemed like spamming out attacks was the best move, I didn't feel like I really needed to dodge much. I don't think getting hit should be more punishing though--maybe dodging itself should feel more rewarding.
- I liked the different enemy attacks, although I didn't really pick up on the patterns (maybe relating to me just spamming attacks). I guess it sorta just felt like too much work for me to figure out how to predict the attacks for not enough of a reward. Basically, I didn't learn any attack 'tells' or things like that (if there were tells, of course), which is fine of course, just felt different from similar games where that's a big focus (like Punch Out).
- There didn't seem to be many uses for selecting enemies (most of the time it's just one). It could be interesting to expand on.
Overall, great job!