Thank you for the input. Looking back I agree that the towns and some areas should be more condensed. This was my first game I made some years ago so its been a good learning experience.
The random encounters could also be tweaked too. I was going for an old-school jrpg format, but maybe I took it too far. Your idea for touch entity encounters sounds good.
I'm currently working on another project but I might pull up this old project again and make some of these changes.