Thanks, glad you tried it out. I watch your review on VoD on your channel the other day, so thanks for that, too. :)

3D Models - Yeah, I can do sprite work and I can do 3D model work...but I can't draw worth crap. So character renders and...fairly standard tileset. Just how it worked with the timeline available. I figured the clash wouldn't be too bad, though since even mainstream 16/32-bit era RPGs would use detailed battlers alongside sprites. But it can be jarring seeing it side by side.

Battles - Unfortunately, RPG Maker does not make it easy to totally eliminate the Escape feature. I was able to change Attack to Strategize and Guard to rest easily enough, but apparently you need complex plug-ins to totally eliminate the ability to escape. Or a complicated go around that didn't respond how I wanted it to in alpha testing. So I had to just use a plug-in to hide the Escape and hope nobody stumbled upon it. You did, though, haha.

The idea was actually to punish the player with those battles. To simulate Yoshimoto and Sagami struggling to make it through the forest. Likewise you don't heal between boss fights if you get the riddles wrong, so there's incentive to fight as few battles as possible, since they gave nothing to the player, but risked taking away.

Riddles - Glad you liked them. And yeah, watching you play it when you mentioned that I basically had a facepalm moment. Because I had the script right beside me, with all my testing, I never thought "The player can't see the script, only what I put on screen." So, that's my mistake - definitely something I'd fix in a full release or such.

Story - Glad you liked the story some, story's my specialty so it came first, then the rest of the game. Haha. Originally there were five bosses, but that made the game far too long, so two of them were eliminated. Initially the Tengu was supposed to be the tea drink, but when the bosses were cut from 5 to 3, he became the final miniboss, so the Kappa replaced him as the tea drinker. (Removed bosses were...originally there would be both a Bakeneko and a Rakshasa, but they merged using the Bakeneko's personality on the Rakshasha's design. The other removed enemy was a Saru (Monkey). But when I removed the Great Ape from the boss list, I wound up splitting him into three different monkey-related regular enemies).

So, glad you seemed to like it overall. And thanks for the critique. :)