Okay, so before I get into it I'll cover the bugs I found, get that part out of the way:
- Tutorial replays if you fight the Crawk when it respawns
- When Skeyedar uses Glare, the target's name is appended with "undefined" (whether used by an enemy or party monster) (this also happens with Snamair's Thump)
- The boss gate visually separates you from your last monster slot, which is a bit jarring
- Party Cheer raises AP but the battle log message says MP
Surprising no one, SmashArtist has made a visually beautiful game. I love the concept and the Pokémon-esque nature of it, though that also introduces an issue I'll get into in a second.
The intro was cool, but a bit abstract. I wasn't entirely clear on how I got where I was or what I was doing or *why* I was collecting these monsters, but you've said you plan on expanding the story so I'm sure you'll address those points.
Tilesets, like the characters were clean and functional. There is a minor nitpicky issue I could bring up in the placement of the trees next to cliffs (you occasionally have a half-tree that goes flush against the side of a cliff edge, but realistically there wouldn't be room there for the other half of the tree) but that's a very, very minor point in a game that's almost visually flawless.
I liked the tent mechanic, though it would have been good if there were a couple more items to craft. After the Star Sword and Star Shield I didn't need to craft anything else; items were plentiful enough on the map that I never needed to make any.
Battles were, on the whole, fun, but the party system introduces a problem: being able to act with the kid and 3 monsters in battle makes you vastly overpowered compared to the enemy. After I had a full party, in every battle where I didn't want to replace a monster I just attacked with everyone and roflstomped whatever I was fighting. Pokémon gets around this by only allowing one of your monsters to act at any given time, which I think might have lent an interesting strategic element here. Though I understand that you used no plugins and this isn't something you can do easily in the default engine.
The additional on-map ability of each monster is also engaging and fun, but the nature of how the party functions works against it. It's difficult to get attached to a particular monster when you end up having to replace it for no other reason than to bring in a monster that lets you access a part of the map you don't have the ability for yet, and the distribution of these areas meant that on a couple of occasions I had to backtrack just to replace a monster to get the item and then go and replace it again with the monster I had originally because I only wanted that one for its map ability. But again, without plugins that's not something you could easily do anything about so I don't count it against you.
It may be because I ended up partially power-levelling, but I have to disagree with Drifty about the boss being perfectly balanced. With a stun ability, the Star Sword, and a couple of 20+ damage attacks on my other monsters, I made mincemeat out of it. I think it got one attack off the entire fight and it dealt hardly any damage to my monster. I think you could definitely have gotten away with tuning it a bit higher.
Overall, though, this is definitely among my favourite entries played so far, and I think you've done a phenomenal job that stands a very good chance of going far in the contest. Well done!