Woah, thanks for the long review! I'm afraid I'll not be able to respond to everything, but here goes:
Cup cake trees, hehe! I do hope I could do a better job with environment modeling if I took more time to do it (and with a different aim than this jam, obviously). I couldn't use a landscape because my PS1 simulation material wouldn't work with it, so I had to do things in a more oldschool and terrible way. The fox mask people are actually supposed to be Goblins, though I can kind of see where that comes from...
With things like "Huge uncomfortable polar bear", and the sound descriptions your review was quite funny to read! :D
Nice, you got ending 1! I doubt many people will feel like trying to get the other two, somehow.
I must confess that I never actually owned a PS1, I think good PS1 games definitely looked better than this by far. I'd imagine there were some around that had this type of environment, though. Especially straight, flat, treeline walls seem like something I remember from quite a lot of old games!
I would have liked to make lower polygon models, but I somehow feel like that would've actually taken a lot MORE effort than their current state. The people making PS1 era models must have been really good to get away with so few polygons! I did use very small texture samples for everything except the skybox, but I think it's less evident because of the higher polygon count and pixellization.
Oh, and I definitely wanted that simulation of affine texture mapping. While people thankfully made tutorials about how to do it in UE4, it still took me a while to actually get it to work on my end.
Thanks for all your praise about Airi! I don't know if it's "cheating", but her concept actually exists for over a year now and she's my most fleshed out character. The actual content itself was all made during the jam though, in fact the entire project basically started with the thought of "Hm, the modifier is 'retro'. It'd be a bit boring to use 2D pixel art since I already use that a lot for other games, and my Construct 3 license expired anyway. I could try to make a 3D model of Airi in a PS1 era style...".
And so I learned how to use Blender to rig her and tried to build a game around her. If you actually like her enough, she does feature in my short visual novel over here: https://cubehero.itch.io/radiant-sun-academy , although I'd rewrite some parts of her story in there if I did it again now. Also her initial concept art because you had so many positive comments about her (She doesn't even have a sap on her sheet, but ended up fighting almost exclusively with that):
