Thanks for making this game! I had an interesting experience with this one.
Obviously, one of the greatest things about this game is that it's so technically impressive.
TheUnproPro's technical scripting prowess shows off to great aplomb here, with the game feeling like it wasn't made in RPG Maker at all, with custom windows, smooth animations, and custom fonts. If you had told me this was made in Game Maker or some other engine, I would have 100% believed you.
Another magnificent thing about this game was that it was incredibly on theme. Sometimes, when playing games in this jam, I felt like the theme was an incidental thing, but here it was right smack bang in the centre.
When I entered the meat of the game, I became immediately aware that it was almost like an idle RPG sort of game, except you chose your actions, so I guess it wasn't an idle RPG at all, but in ways it did feel like it was. When you execute actions, stats improve by themselves for the most part, and you can choose from maybe 5 actions to improve your stats, and each of those has a respective minigame.
I found the minigames were technically impressive in the way they were implemented, but perhaps the part where I started to detach from the game was because of the gameplay nature of the minigames.
When going on an Adventure, I was never quite sure what to pick. Oftentimes I'd get totally annihilated by enemies, and I had no idea why, or how to improve. When fighting enemies, you select between 3 options, and I think I knew generally when to use each, but I wasn't sure the best way to improve my character to get further into the dungeon.
I appreciated the ability to speed it up, but because actions in Adventures happened in real time, and they wouldn't pause when I encountered them, speeding it up meant that it would also speed up the danger that was coming towards me to a rate where I felt I couldn't respond in quick time.
With the dance game, this was also super impressive! I don't think I've seen a rhythm game completed in RPG Maker with that high precision - it was very high!... eeeeeeexcept when trying to press two keys at once. For some reason, if I pressed two direction keys at once, it only received one key press, so I was unable to do this minigame in a way that satisfied me because a lot of moves were essentially impossible for me. But I would LOVE to see an entire rhythm game made in RPG Maker on this concept... IF that bug was fixed on my system. I assume it's only on some systems, otherwise the developer would have picked it up in testing.
There's a well-implemented "ball bouncing" minigame to represent howling at the moon, but sadly this got quite irritating quickly, even though it was really impressive. It was high stress on my brain and hands, in a way that wasn't super fun, although with a few tweaks I think it would be a lot more fun. Introducing different concepts like maybe you have to avoid obstacles that fall, pick up power-ups, etc. to make this minigame more fun in general. It feels sad saying this about something so technically impressive, but it's important not to ignore gameplay considerations even if something is technically impressive. If anything, I think that there's a framework that can be built upon and polished into something even more fantastic than what already exists.
All in all, I would say that this game is a very technically impressive feat that has a fantastic premise and concept... that I sort of lost interest after a little while playing, for some reason, which is a sad outcome. Maybe it's the interestingness of the minigames that needs to increase, or the overall balance, but something about it made me check out after a bit. I feel like if it were tightened around the edges, it could become something that would be truly addictive and I would return to again and again, BUT I still will marvel at this amazing technical piece of work that has a LOT of awesome scripting behind it from a promising developer who I will follow now on itch.io because I can't wait to see what comes next.
Thanks for giving us this fantastic gift of a game :)