I thought you would appreciate this game, and I wasn't wrong. 🧚🧚🧚
I resisted for very long the idea of having professional art (firstly because I prefer doing everything myself, secondly because I had zero experience doing commissions and thirdly because spending a bunch of money for a game I don't plan to make any money from seems not very reasonable). But I finally decided myself actually start of Augustus to try out commissioning some visual novel-like CGs, and the experience was way better that I expected, so much so that I plan to have a full gallery of those (currently, there are only 2 of those illustrations, and they come later into the game).
I wasn't expecting icons would be one of the first things you would consider changing, but I guess there is nothing wrong looking at an alternative for those. For character art, which ones exactly were you referring too? Having a customised character CG for most main characters and use them on the game's page, on the title screen and in the in-game menu? May be you were suggesting to change the faceset of the main characters (and use VN style buste instead), their battlers, their charsets... ? And what about the NPCs who share the same style as the main characters?
Also, during my train jail, I missed the title feedback part. Basically, I made it myself, so I have a biased view of it. So a wanted an artist's point of view concerning it on what it does well, what it does wrong, and how it could be improved further. (May be it isn't good and I should just commission a new one?) I would really appreciate having your fairy advice on the matter. 🧚
PS: If you want to come back for more after feedbackquest, be my guest. 🧚
For a free game it is understandable you want to keep the cost under control. I would say if you want more people to play your game however, commissioning for title art, commissioning for key character portraits will be very important,, you can leave the pixel art alone and use default, and use default GUI and everything else, but character icons should be changed. You can pick an artist that can adapt this style but take it their own way to make it seem less out of the template, people can tell the templates easily because RPG maker is well known, to set yourself apart from other games to stand out you must have customized art. Another way is have your artist do a template of your own, so you can mix and match yourself, but that might be more expensive than just straight up character portraits, it could help your future games though.
I get that you would want to do everything yourself, it is the long way, but respectable, if you want to, post your title art on my discord "art leveling" channel and I will give you a very detailed critique. I don't want to do that here since it's very involved and specific. https://discord.gg/wYKghA7
As for taking further look outside of Fest, probably not at this moment since I am spending most of my current time outside of fest to finish my own game and productions. I will revisit in the future when I have free time to stream indiegames regularly again.
Just to be sure, the "character icons" you are mentioning are your way of calling the facesets (like the one here under), or is it something else?