I used to be one of the admins of the largest GBA fans bbs in China, and I've written some walkthrough such as finding hidden rooms, strange items dropped by boss
While your game's menu strikes me as retro, there were quite a few games at the time that had menus like that. The most obvious one is still the skill system, which is exactly the way Shining Soul 2 was.
Yeap, I really like the spell charge system too, the only difference is that I will code it to allow a fast way to cast the spell, without the need to charge
