Thank you so much for the in-depth analysis! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
The colors being only black, white, and two shades of blue is explicitly taken from one of the color palettes Game Boy games could have if played on a Game Boy Color. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#Game_Boy_Color
As for extracting the game, I'm not sure what I could have done to make it easier. It's a single download and extraction, then Setup.exe installs the game, then you click RPG_RT.exe to play it. I don't see where the difficulty comes in. If it's a matter of the installer or the file name of the executable, those are are immutable aspects of RPG Maker 2003 that I unfortunately have no control over.
The extracting process is relatively easy but when you do, there are a couple of files that get extracted.
1st, the file that you first download is a rar file.
2nd, once extracted there’s another surfacing compressed archive folder called surfacing.lzh and a setup.exe above it. So I was sitting there thinking which one am I supposed to use and what is a lzh file? And whats the point of the setup file when you can just extract the lzh file which then extracts a bunch of folders and files, like a typical rpg maker game, into the one space where you are extracting? Like you could just make a folder and drag and drop the lzh file in there and then extract it but why would we have to do that ourselves?
Using the setup is an easy way to extract though. The thing is with the setup file is that if you don’t click on make an uninstall file then you’d have to go and search for it’s location after you’re done playing it to delete it. If you’re like me, you have a ssd and another hard drive and I keep my indie games in the other hard drive that’s on my computer so if I forgot to click "make an uninstall" then I’d have to go in search for it in the c drive to delete it. And why is the exe for the game called rpg_rt?
Not a big deal but would prefer to just extract the file, click on the surfacing folder like in the lzh file, scroll to the bottom of the folder, click on the surfacing.exe, and start playing.