I never played octopath, so no Idea that it had a similar battle system.
The sword cursor itself is nice, it just doesn't fit with the rest of the graphics I think.
Moving NPCs should definetly have collision, it looks super weird floating over them.
For the Dialogue, I understand wanting to save time/energy on doing a bunch of dialogue sprites, but it really disrupts the flow and feel of it, when theres just some bracketed text describing what is happening while theres actually nothing happening. It doesn't even have to be a unique animation per action, if you include a handful of generic ones, like reaching into a pocket, pointing somewhere/handing something out, holding hands over the face etc, especially on those low resolution sprites, it can already look convincing enough.
For the overloaded systems, it seems to be a lot more then just a shield break and a boost. You still have your weakness exploits combined with weapon swapping on top, aswell as generic spells like buffs/taunts/status effects etc.
If you're limiting the number of skills you can equip at once, the unlock/equip skill section makes a lot more Sense, but the whole relic/boost section just feels useless. I mean, of course its usefull to boost your attack to increase damage and such, but I don't think thats needed at all. You might just aswell have a proper setup for the weapon swapping to exploit weaknesses and break shields with it, instead of tacking a boost system on top. But then the same thing is with the shield break itself, of course it helps that every few attacks the enemy gets stunned/weakened, but you might aswell just have them be weak to certain elements/types directly.
To me personally at least, it feels like I'm always jumping through multiple unneeded hoops when I could just aswell attack a demon with holy i.e. to get boosted damage, instead of having to attack it with holy to break its shield to increase damage, then pump in relics to also increase damage. The core of what I have to do is the same, attack the demon with holy, but instead of getting a direct feedback of increased damage, I have to wittle down the shields with it, and then pump my relic points into it.
Now, if shield break didn't affect damage/stun the enemy, but do something interesting once it happens, but requiring specific shield breaking skills to do it, or if relics could only be gained by relic gaining skills instead of at the end of a turn, and be used for proper effect alterations, like relic-ing a poison spell to turn from singletarget into multitarget, or otherwise changing spells in a more interesting way then numbers going up, that'd be nice.
This might have been in the Demo, I didn't play around with too many skills, since every combat quickly boiled down to looking what weakness they have under their healtbar, and spamming the related skill to get their armor off, then just using three relics on the same skill to finish them off.
If you intend to keep all the systems, a simple way is to introduce weapon swapping once a second weapon drops/gets found early on, before any trader. On first levelup you can explain the leveling system, instead of in the intro directly. Class swapping/spell learning could be moved over to NPCs/Camp, so you can't do that everywhere, and then be explained once you reach the proper storypoint. Be it the first city, first camp or whatever. If not every enemy gets a shield to break, but only stuff like the big beetles i.e., you can have a forced encounter with a shielded enemy to explain shieldbreaks once it becomes important. Same for relics, if I'm assuming those are connected to the stone thing the main character is wearing, you can i.e. explain and unlock that whole thing when the witch joins for the wolf battle. Instead of having it autoloose and then have an overpowered witch come and finish it all, have the witch unlock/explain the relic thing, and have the wolves only be beatable by properly using the relic powers. For more then just damage/number of attack boosts of course. I.e. a normal sword slash does just damage, but a relic'd one breaks shields equal to number of relics into it.
Just throwing some Ideas around here on how to maybe make the system more interesting/interact with each other more. Haven't made a JRPG tho, apart from a bunch of old and terrible prototypes using stock RPGMaker combat, so keep that in mind please.
I'll be sure to give this another go a few months/DDs from now, to see what you come up with, it isn't necessarily a bad Game after all, just kind of early in development I think.