Really enjoyed this quick entry! Battles were fast and fun, references were enjoyable to see, and that custom artwork was impressive. The game felt a bit unfinished, as though you hit the 90% mark and ran out of steam. Battles were fun due to the varied skills and battlers, but it didn't feel like there was too much as far as meaningful choice.

Beating Oldhar felt like a roll of the dice as Time Ninja's blind basically destroyed him, but he was pretty hard aside from that. Seeing every party combination have some useful strategy would have really helped this entry, but as it was it felt like just picking the good characters was the real meta. Regardless, it was a blast seeing the cool art you made for the jam. Hope to see more of it in the future!

Solid entry Nate.  Enjoyed it, found the world map a little tricky to navigate but really enjoyed the combat.  Good stuff.

Gameplay: Serviceable, but I wish the areas you couldn't go were a little more clearly defined. I found myself getting stuck a lot.

Combat: Pretty straightforward. Liked how each attack was in the menu rather than in a folder. Can't believe we both had the same idea for Dark Spark!

Comedy: Not much to be found, albeit it's not a disservice to the game.

Sound: Loved the custom music and the nods to each series. Wonder who did Amara's battle theme.

Visuals: The hand-drawn maps and characters are a highlight. I just wish the portraits got the same love.

Story: Honestly a really cool idea, although the ending felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

This was quick but fun with enjoyable battles. Also nice job on the custom battlers. That aside:

• Routes on the world map weren’t always very easy to figure out. I had a lot of bumping my way around in a few places, like the left-hand side in particular.
• Character and ability balance felt a bit lopsided. For example, time ninja’s smoke bomb was ridiculously good since it always goes first and nothing seems to be immune to it. Everything else he had was pretty blah though.
• In line with the above, every fight felt like it had the same strategy
• I know these characters are from other games, but I’m not familiar with any of them. Without any sort of meaningful scenes/etc besides the initial “Hi I’ll join you party!” dialog, much of who they are is lost on anyone like me who doesn’t recognize them. A bit more content highlighting who they are in the games their from would’ve gone a long way imo. Like if each point on the map took you to some ultra-mini version of the character’s game world or something instead of just popping a boss battle.

The world map art, sprite art and animations were  so cool Nate, well done :)

Battles were tough, but usually fair. I don't know how it happened, but defeating Beryl took forever (3 battles and over 15 minutes). Clearly I was doing something wrong as on my third try I defeated her not long after starting.

I loved the visuals! The custom sprites, battlers and tiles are *chef's kiss*

Only bug I noticed was at the bottom right of the map I could see crystals and a MV sprite hanging around.

Love the custom battlers with excellent action sequences! The skills for each members were very thematic and well done. 

A nice and short game jam entry. I do have to agree with the others that the final boss is a little too OP, mainly because it one has two turns, and two, it always goes before your healer so it can KO who you were trying to heal. I think a small nerf to damage and making it so your healer can go before it would help a lot to fixing that.

Would like to see this idea expanded though someday if wish to do that.

I enjoyed this! This was my first one that I played, I have to say I adore the art and the battlers SO much. I can't believe you did so much cool custom stuff in that amount of time--You're so awesome, dude!

The custom battlers were really cool, and I like how smooth the animations were (OldHar's katana draw in particular stood out)! The only minor issues I had were with the map (although it was really nice to look at, it also made it a bit easy to unintentionally hit dead ends), and the balance of the last boss (I felt like I only managed to beat it through luck, although this might be intentional since it is the last boss). Keep up the good work!

Edit/delete: Accidentally double posted the same comment.

A lot of visual appeal and the quality of the presentation was very high.

I didn't like the pixel-movement map combined with how difficult it was to discern terrain details, but thankfully it wasn't a huge detriment.

The concept of recruiting characters was neat, though you don't really have time to learn what they do since there's so few battles. And even in that time I found the battle balance kind of questionable (Amara is outrageously OP and most of the other character's gimmicks kind of don't work or take too much setup).

Overall I liked it, it was definitely bite-sized and interesting enough to consider playing through again since I didn't get to use Beryl at all.

This was beautiful and one of my favs and had such a majestic charm too it!