This game has a really polished look, and definitely isn't lacking for content. I'd want to see more player feedback in a full version, but overall, a nice "RPGish" experience.

Loved the intro opening song. The mechanics were really nicely done. Good work on your submission

The music is so funny

Hahaha, great work on the music! Had me laughing from the start. I love simple RPGs like this, great work.

Good stuff! I think your approach to the game OST is honestly great and more games should do this. I also liked the graphical aesthetic as well as the writing of the enemies, it got a laugh out of me.

I think the core idea is real interesting and I like the branching-path mechanics - though it's not clear to me, is one direction harder or easier?

I made it through most of the battles by boosting repeatedly then attacking - is there a cap to how much you can boost? I would have appreciated some visual marking for how much boost I have stored up.

Another way to diversify the gameplay might be to give the player a choice of what upgrade they receive after each battle, to let them build the character their own way. Nice work!

I really enjoyed the humor, the audio, and the graphics. The battles did get a little repetitive after a few fights, but overall a great submission.

Good: Music is probably the best thing ever. Everything has a solid, consistant, good looking retro aesthetic.
Bad: The core gameplay loop was veryyyy boring. Because meditate spam heals you faster than any enemy in the game can damage you, if you mash it while at half health you cant lose.

Nerd stuff: Without any abilities or effects to play against, there are only two numbers that matter: 'How many turns will it take for the enemy to kill me' and 'How many turns will it take for me to kill them'. The players objective is to find a strategy that makes the second of those two numbers lower than the first. The question for the player is 'How do these abilities impact those numbers'

Meditate basically gives you more than one extra turn for the price of one, even against the game boss, so the first of those two numbers is infinity, and the worst case scenario becomes stalemate. Meditate is OP!

Defence is useless if it lasts a single turn: 3/4 times you add one to your enemies 'timer' and have no impact on your own timer. Even if you block a full attack, which it doesnt seem like it does, you are spending a turn to save less than half a turn. Defence in this state is unusable! If it does something else than what I suspect, maby it is good, but meditate is already a perfect tool. Boosting defence is obviously horrible.

Finally, boost and attack. There were no instructions for how to use these optimally, and boost seemed to stack logarithmically. I found a good balance with two boosts per attack, but hard to tell exactly whats best. This seems like the best way to optimize damage, our second objective

So the core gameplay is:
- If health < 50%, meditate
- If we have < 2 boosts, boost
- Attack

To be fair, this optimization problem of ensuring every ability has a niche and player options are trully dynamic is really difficult to avoid in a JRPG system.

@sayumeki Thanks for the kind words on the music. As for if one path is more difficult than another the short answer is no. I made the decision in development to simplify the game balance so I didn't accidentally make the game unbeatable the and so that for most paths the player can take through the game they would end up with an pretty even amount of attack and defense boost. There should be a cap on how many times you can boost but I don't think I ever check if it worked so it may be possible that you can boost forever but it should be that you can only boost two times before it caps out.)

That music though! I really liked the look of the spirits too. The battles were a bit repetitive, seems like it could've used some rock/paper/scissors kinds of mechanics with different abilities or something. I found myself always either in a loop of boost-boost-attack, or meditating over and over once I took a few hits.

@polypickle Happy to hear that you like the music and my retro aesthetic. Not surprised to hear that you thought the main gameplay loop was boring but good golly miss molly did you ever crack me right open with your nerd stuff.
I can't tell you how much I love seeing somebody dig into my stuff this thank you so much.

Now to respond to your nerd stuff
1. I seeing you explain it I can see how meditate is overpowered. Ironically you actually found the secret to breaking meditate I hoped most people would only kind of catch onto which is that it heals you for a quarter of the current value of your health so it becomes less useful the in health you become. I had hopped this would make people feel a little excited as there help dropped lower but I see you realized how to break it so congratulations to you.

2. You are 100% right about defend being a useless move. For reference when you defend it simply raises your defense stat in the game reducing damage (so if used with a boost it will prevent all damage from some enemy). There is a chance you did not see this effect as different spirits actually have different stats so some are better at defending then others while some have a higher base attack. On the note of having a 3/4th chance to add one to your enemys time. You actually are not quite right on this minor thing. Each enemy has a set of moves it picks from with some having favorites (for example some enemy's only have a 1/10 chance of meditating but have a something like a 6/10 chance of attacking).

3. Ding Ding Ding you hit the nail on the head. This was the exact strategy I used during development to speed through my test playthroughs as I was checking for glitches. I had hoped it wouldn't be so transparent but its good to see people figuring out the optimization like this. You are correct boost does stack logorithmicly (the exact formula is something like damage done = attack * boost where boost is stacked by how many times you press it before you attack) although there should be a limit to it which is actually 3 so you once again hit the exact right number so hats off to you.

I am really happy to see someone dig into this game like this thank you very much for this comment it truly has made my night. Many thanks to you and hats off to having such a big brain that you solved my game.

fun idea for using your voice for the music. the way you did the hero select screen music with the echo was very smart!

`boost`-ing a whole bunch of time and `attack` was my strategy until the last three and then my strategy was switching between that and the best combo of `boost` + `boost` + `meditate` + `attack` and repeat. I have never used `defend`, _ever_, in any RPG game; this game did not change my mind about this.

I really like the intro and outro text of all the characters (ice lobster and the demon prince are my favourites), it is a real nice touch and good attention to detail.
The characters looked very stylish and fun!

Some things you may consider for the future:

Pressing the 🅧 to continue the text felt off at first, I was expecting maybe a ▶︎.

I think if I were able to see my own stats, I would feel the items I get after defeating an opponent would become more meaningful to me. also showing them would contribute to the feeling of growth and achievement during the game.

Making a fun rpg combat system is really hard and I did notice your effort in making it very play-able! adding little dynamics like dodging, elemental types (the cool characters you designed would be perfect for this) or special moves would be a nice next move in your battle system.

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👍I enjoyed playing your game and got the crown on my second try!

This was a nice and complete experience. The battle gameplay itself was a little frustrating and repetitive, but regardless I enjoyed the game while it lasted. That music makes the game and brought a huge smile on my face, thank you! :)

Had me chuckling for the music right away. While I don't particular enjoy this genre, I love your writing, it was just the right amount of silly <3 Keep creating.

You got me at "Frog guardian drop a frog leg" :rofl: The game seems choke full with content as well so that's a definitely a plus. My strategy so far has been: Boosting + spam attack. I'm not sure the elemental attribute plays into damage calculation and if I can use that to formulate a different approach as well.

Would love to see each boss has a different hint to what they might do next. Or adding effect that interfere with boss's action (stun, paralyzed, burnt, frozen)

How did you make all the character graphic? Is it programmatically generated some way? They look very symmetrical and have a sweet pattern to it.

Really nice! :)

I love the look of the characters, PETSCII-like! The music during the fight gets annoying pretty fast though :)
I made it up to the demon prince who beat me to a pulp.
I like that different approaches are required.

Overall really well done!

I liked the hummed music in the background.

Towards the end of the game the battles became long and grinding, speeding up the sequence or the ability to skip through the delay between each stage would have made it a lot more playable.

Written dialouge was humerous and enjoyable to read.

The music just blew me away. Aside from the ear piercing common sounds, this game was a nice time-waster. Kudos!

There's clearly a lot of polish put in this game. The graphics look clean and the music is :100: .

But most of the time I feel less like trying to read the enemy and more trying to trick the AI behind it. I think this is because both me and the enemy have the same moves (albeit with differing stats) and because meditate often repairs many turns of effort.

I'd encourage you to keep working on this game as I think intelligence and move variety are key to an entertaining rpg.

@sneakycocoon Good to hear you enjoyed my little jokes I put in like frog legs. The answer to your question about sprites is that yes they are computer generated. A few days before the jam I found a news artical about an artist who was doing character designs based of randomly generated sprite. I tracked down the [website](http://img.uninhabitant.com/spritegen.html?controls=false&controls=true&autorandomize=false&pal=arne&colours=2&bg=0&size=16&spacing=4&tiles=16&zoom=1&scaler0=eagle2x&scaler1=eagle2x&advanced=false&advanced=true&seed=1587396859731&autoreseed=false&autoreseed=true&falloff=linear&probmin=0&probmax=1&bias=0.5&gain=0.5&mirrorh=0.75&mirrorv=0.25&mirrord1=0.25&mirrord2=0.25&despeckle=0.9&despur=0.5) he used and that is what supplied all the character graphics.

@endurion Wow I didn't know that PETSCII was a thing looking it up I see it was used for the Commodore64 I actually did use the Commodore64 color pallet for all the sprites and the world map so that might have something to do with it looking like that. Thanks for playing my game.

Yeah take that prince, Veggies for you! Great game man, music was a chuckle

What a great game. Music is 10/10. Best ost! I also like the simple UI.

The music is amazing! Always a fan of the homemade style. The gameplay was alright too, but I found myself spamming the boost button to deal huge damage in single hits to prevent them healing it all back up. Also I found when I was against the fire moth, using meditate did heal me, but the text said I healed him! Nice game, nice graphics. Well done!

I like the abstract style for the monsters.
Maybe there could be more depth to the attacks, like different ones, but you have the best music!

Hey awesome game! Maybe the pacing of the battles could improve a bit, since a battle can go for a long time given the possible actions of the characters, the heal action heals a lot lol. After a while in a battle it starts to lose its fun. Overall great game, nice job! :D

The music is so funny. I almost thought of doing that with my game when I felt like I wasn't going to have enough time. Wish there was more ways to attack. First enemy took too long to defeat. I just spamming attack. Then on the second one I spammed boost and then attack. Like the art style too. You made different types of enemies with limited pixels.

Nice one, overall a very polished compo game! Loved the audio and graphics! The gameplay felt a bit repetitive and "random". By "random" I mean that I could not see any way to use strategies against the various enemies, because it didn't feel like they had any strategy on their side. But again, congrats for the game. It is hard to have something so "looking like a real game" in such a short time!

woah!! i liked this games!!I love the minimalist graphics and especially the music you made with your voice, it makes it very fun. great job!!

music is good, like the game

It's great you did something for LD anon; out of curiosity, can you share the main project you're working on?