This is a very stylish game, but I'm not really sure that it really fits the theme all that well? I appreciate that you're basically scaling up in power, but in practice this feels like a normal fighting game, and the theme is more of a technicality. It was pretty fun, though, and I say that as someone who has only ever played Smash as a fighting game. I was a bit confused that I couldn't jump for the first level, though. I liked that you had voice acting for the announcer (I hope you find him again eventually), and that the names popped up in both English and Japanese! I couldn't get past the second fight, but I do have one nitpick relating to it (and you should take it with a giant grain of salt, given that I can only "read" Japanese due to it sharing characters with Chinese), which is that I think the characters used for Kong Jr. don't sound quite right? It reads to me as "Kong child," when I think it might be more correct to use the characters for "small Kong"? I defer to someone with more actual Japanese knowledge than me on that, though, and it's a very silly nitpick.
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Thanks for the detailed review. I talked a bit with our artist about the use of Kanji and he ended up just using pretty much Google translated phrases from Chinese, which can often approximate to the meaning but like you pointed out, probably isn't the typical wording in Japanese. It was pretty much purely for aesthetic reasons. I was pushing for Kanji that I thought worked from looking at Jisho.
I see the criticism for the theme though really we scrapped pretty much anything we thought about to conceptualize a game where you start little and grow to a big kaiju by defeating things. It just sorta turned into a fighting game. There are some things we wanted to make the giga form more impactful like evolving the look of the character and more abilities but that's a game jam for ya : P.
Thank you for the kind wishes about our voice actor, I will update on any news I hear about his well-being.
Ah, I think from an aesthetic perspective your artist probably made the right call on the wording for Kong Jr., given that he was planning to use the Chinese characters. The "more correct" wording (in Chinese, at least) involves fewer characters and fewer strokes, and probably most of your players aren't going to be actually reading it anyway. I'm honestly barely literate so it was partly the novelty of being able to understand the characters in the first place that even made me notice the phrasing xD
Also yeah, I can definitely see how the time constraints of the game jam would interfere with your vision for the theme that way! I hope if you revisit this game in the future, you get to add the evolutions and abilities you'd planned on :)