Shard Saviors is without a doubt the entry with the best presentation of this jam, not only is the art, music really high quality but they are really unique. All player character being blue and enemy characters being red gives it a feel of cohesion with the game sprites. Also all Shard Holders have unique portraits, giving a feel that each enemy is unique.
The tileset are is also incredible, is simple in nature not trying to hide the grid at all and most terrain being "a single tile", there are no conecting forest, mountains or anything, even the roads don't connect properly to avoid breaking the grid pattern.
And the writing is top notch too, the premise of civilization depeding on some sort of magic crystal that shatters (also everyone looking stonish like) and that then needs to get back put together is a great interpretation of the theme.
Also, the characters interactions were fun and I was really looking foward to recruit more guys, beacuse each conversation was such a treat.
All that being said, while the gameplay premise is really good, and the use of "advance wars roads" really helped backtracking, I think the team run out of time to give it a second pass or balance it out.
The map is really big, but the only enemies (at the start) are the lonely shard holders around, at the start is alright since you have few units, but it never really scales, while you get to build an army to march around, shard holders just stay put waiting for their demise. The reinforcements that target your home castle make sure you need at least a couple of guys left there to protect it, giving at least a secondary objective to just marching on.
Also, I'm fairly certain that all weapons and items, outside of dark eruption are the default items that come when creating a new project, another thing that ties into the not-scaling of the game, you don't get better weapons or items at any point.
And by the halfway point, characters just started joining with no dialog.
I'm hoping for some later updates to add the missing dialog and see if a second pass makes the last half of the game more interesting.
Overall, the game is great in all the things related to presentation and theme, but the gameplay loop never scales in complexity besides marching to kill the next shard holder, wich makes the last half an exercise in patience more than anything. Still I'm holding my hopes up to see how this turns out after a few updates.