The default scroll text speed is too slow, but good job including the option to adjust that manually. I think it could be defaulted to a bit quicker scroll speed though because I have to hit the action button for every new scroll text as I find myself waiting for the text to appear.
The music feels a little of out place in some areas, but it's not terrible.
The combat system itself feels very slow and clunky, but I do like the battle backgrounds. I'd recommend making the ATB quicker and make it wait instead of active. This may sound counter intuitive, but it's not and here's why...
The way it is now (on active) it goes like this:
The action bars for both the enemy and player fill up very slowly, then when the player's fills up, a window pops up for you to input your commands, but when the enemies' bars fill up they immediately select an action and go. So if you just increase the ATB speed the game will effectively get harder and it would effect the feel and balance of the game in the wrong direction.
Instead you need to set it to 'Wait-style ATB' and then when the player's bar fills up the enemies ATB bar will freeze where it's at and give the player time to input their commands with all the time they need in the world to strategize. When they do, the bars will fill up quickly (because you increase the speed of the ATB). This will net a much smoother and better combat system. Right now it's a slog and frankly just really bad.
Quit blueballin' the player with empty treasure chests. People get fed up with that real quick.
You gain TP too slow. You can use a plugin to add your own TP modes, I would suggest you add a new mode that gives more TP. Maybe gain TP when you hit an enemy and when you're hit by an enemy. Double it across the board and allow getting hit to also increase your TP. (Kind of like quadrupling the overall amount).
Guarding should restore HP and MP, because only giving 2 MP is just not enough. Have it give like 20HP and 10MP.
You don't get the option to run from combat, the fights take FOREVER and you can't even heal by using items or guarding or anything.
Why can't we save the game? You should allow players to save when they want as long as it doesn't effect the game in a way that would cause a soft lock.
The battle system is completely imbalanced and unfortunately you spend 90% of your time in a combat with creatures. The owl's moves are way over powered. There are just so many things wrong with this.
When you die, because you WILL die eventually, the game will restart from the last save point, and sometimes that's the beginning of the game. Forcing you to replay the slow and painful battles up until the last save point.
Supposedly the game has an autosave feature, which to the best of my knowledge it should save when you do a transfer map event. But it didn't save for me when I switched to the second map and it also doesn't save after the battles. So I don't see ANY save features here.
Nice try, but I'm afraid that you've severely missed the mark on this project. Better luck next time. Thanks for entering the competition and I hope that you've learned some new skills from this whole process.