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Thanks for the extra feedback!

Well, it's not so much that I expected that everyone use a very specific strategy, but the tools to make the fight considerably easier are definitely accessible by the player, is what I'm trying to say.  All of the skills do say precisely which effects they have though, so I would hope that most players would, y'know, give a closer look at what each of their skills do.

Well no, you weren't wrong - maybe that was just a poor choice of words on my part. But I felt like you became frustrated with the final battle, and I just feel that you would have been less frustrated if you used all of the skills available to you. That's part of why I gave the player access to all of the party's skills from the start, after all. 

Actually, the moral grey area was definitely intended. In general, I like telling stories where characters - both heroes and villains - may not be entirely black or white. Sometimes good guys do bad things, and sometimes bad guys have secret noble goals. Of course, Alathamaskia was plainly evil, but while Felix comes off as being a generic spunky heroic protagonist... remember, he's under Alathamaskia's control the entire game, so do we even REALLY know what Felix is capable of, in terms of his morality?  But even that aside, I really just wanted to tell a story where the main characters - and the player, were forced to do things against their will/logic, and for the villain to REALLY get what was coming to them.

And as you say, this story was originally going to be something much bigger! My original plan was to actually begin Felix and Kia's journey in the ruins of their hometown, just after the demon attack. Then the two of them would travel around the world, doing various things - but rather than just making a wish on a magical item to bring about the near-end of the world, it would be about Kia making Felix escort her around the world, doing something (I didn't really figure out the precise details of what exactly) that would restore her to her full power, which the player and Felix are now unaware has been sealed away by Felix himself. Essentially, she forces him to unlock the locks that he put on her true power and form, while making him and the rest of the party believe that what they're really doing is saving the world from further disaster - and of course, they would only be leading it further towards disaster, as Kia becomes more and more powerful.

Buuut then the game jam happened, and I was like "Well, I want to submit something... so what if I repurpose that plot into something I can stuff into an hour?" ...and that'd how Wish Upon The Star Shard came to be :P

As for what I'm working on in the future... Here's a little teaser of my next project that I'm working on! :)

In this game - which would be a fair bit longer than WUTSS, every single map is only as big as the minimum map size for VX Ace. The whole game is meant to feel like a grand RPG... scaled down to it's most simple form. I hope that when I finish it, you'll try it out!