Scrumbo has chimed in!!!!!!!!
All valid feedback, and all aligned with issues I took down myself before submitting, so that's good at least. The grain / depth-of-field issues proved very hard to find a good balance for, so while I wholly agree on how it makes things hard to see and figure out where you're going at times, I kinda left it that way (rather than going to the opposite extreme of having it look clean and crisp) because I wanted to obstinate lmao. And all this feedback is largely why I won't use RPG Maker for the full version - it'll compromise the experience I intend to make too much.
The full game I intend to make will be far less in your face with references but to create a framework for a public prototype, this felt a fun way to just throw in a bunch of obvious gestures to things I love.