Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• JOMBAT is a menu-based JRPG combat game with roguelike elements. Aesthetically the game is simple but for the most part makes good use of its menus and is easy to navigate and play. The combat system has some unique elements to it such as its turn system where you can strategically save up or overuse turns, and its magic system where your spell power is dependent on the amount of mana that you choose to spend. The player is presented with strategic decisions to make with alternate paths on each floor and an upgrade system with randomized options for progression. JOMBAT appears to go on forever with your final score being how far you made it through the increasingly difficult levels, and has a detailed score sheet you can view and share for each run.
• An experiment in JRPG combat devoted to pure stat min-maxing. There are no party members, abilities or status effects: just pure attack, magic attack, defend and heal, and the randomly generated enemies with silly names are no different. The only progression is through picking perks at the end of the floor and it is the only thing that matters. Nothing else does, and so the game is fine with breaking a lot of rules. You can act multiple times per turn by over-extending your TP (and get hit hard over the next few turns that you have ceded to your enemies), you can choose between easier and harder sets of encounters every floor or straight-up skip entire floors to rest - and do so indefinitely. There's even a Cheats panel that allows full heals or insta-wins - which makes no real difference in the end, as the game has no win condition and goes on indefinitely until you die or end the run with "Egress".
• As intended it does indeed seem to be possible to eventually become unstoppable in JOMBAT given the right combinations of stat bonuses, and there's a fair amount of strategy here. The idea of choosing a harder set of enemies to gain twice as much of reward is a nice way to lure the player to their death if not prepared well enough. In terms of mechanics, saving up extra time to be able to do more attacks at once is an interesting concept, but one that when repeatedly faced with multiple enemies didn't seem all that useful since I generally wanted to kill everything as quickly as possible before it could start damaging me.