Man, was that a moving bit. You definitely feel the impending feeling of violence and bloodshed coming up just by walking around and conversing with the locals. I really like how you present various fantasy archetypes and their supposed array of feelings they have before an actual war starts. It also feels grounded and impactful with both exposition, story, and emotion intertwined together when conversing with the NPCs until the end, where the outcome of the war is left ambiguous with only the dreary cries of battle to be left with. The choice of audio was stellar for this game, really feeling the weight of mournful dread whilst also seeing a slimmer of hope that they can make out of this alive.
The only two things I found off was the scaling of the sprites and the lack of clarity of the environment in terms of platforming. Using pixel art, the NPCs' sprites are pretty obvious that they were scaled, leading to mismatching pixel sizes, especially the prince who was shrunk in order to look smaller than the King. Outside of the art style, the environment often doesn't communicate well what's a wall, what's a platform, and what's foreground. The most prominent example is the first building the player needs to jump over to meet the second NPC. It's not a full building segment that blocks you but instead a balcony with many boxes underneath, which are the same boxes used for the foreground with no color changes. This led to many struggling attempts of platforming when the edges of the platforms are hard to identify.