Character art is cute and the writing is mostly decent, but i think the dialogue itself needs another pass, I'm not good at dialogue myself so I'm not sure what's wrong, but to me it feels slightly unnatural, hard to put my finger on what's wrong but that's just my gut feeling.
Combat is snappy and fun, some more enemy variety would be sweet and I like the telegraphing of enemy behaviour, but it didn't really click for me for a while. Maybe tooltips on enemies could help give a bit more info on what they are doing, at least until you learn what each icon means. I love the crabbos.
Levels are mostly passable but a bit repetitive, falls into the common pitfall where theres loads of map but most of it is using the same 3-5 assets so it's easy to get lost or confused. A bit more variety in overworld art would really help there.
It's a bit weird that enemies don't respawn and are optional. Feels like a way the player can screw themselves by not fighting enough enemies to get enough xp to stay relevant later on. This is a cursed JRPG problem in general, but I think it's worth keeping in mind.
The UI isn't ugly but it also isn't pretty either. It feels a bit off. I think the completely flat UI might be what's wrong here, and the large dead zones on different screens made it feel unpolished. The actual art used seems mostly fine, theres just something off about the composition of UI elements that makes them feel slightly jank. Maybe animation could help here?
Fun demo, would like to see more.
The music is great btw, the menu theme sounds really familiar, I think it has a similar melody to a lovely planet track? I like it, feels very anime bop.