Cool premise, and I'm a big fan of tactical RPGs; however, less dialogue in the beginning and more gameplay. Reading through all that dialogue can be a slog.
I understand what you mean. I felt like the context of the game was important. I think its not that there is too much dialogue (especially compared to other games) but rather its just that the way we conveyed that information could have been more digestible.
Maybe spacing it out, providing a cut scene, and adding voice acting would probably make it feel better to go through, because in reality its not that much dialogue, but maybe its the presentation.
However, I think your feedback reveals another underlying issue that would do the most to making the dialogue not feel so slow, which is that if there was more content during or after the dialogue it might feel like it was more worth it.
If this was a full release I would want to spend more time on adding content but I spent most of the time working on the battle system which did not leave much time to add exploration and even more varied combat.
(Maybe making the tutorial more of a full on battle would help to break up the non-combat segments)
Unfortunately that is the nature of doing your third ever game jam but I hope the visuals and music were intriguing enough to make you feel that the combat system was interesting enough to be redone in a more refined way.
Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback, if you see our previous game jam submissions I'd like to think were getting better with every submission.