I enjoyed the Persona influence, and liked the small bit of story we were given. It feels darker, but very interesting, and I hope this continues into a full game. 

Suggestion: The PG gauge feels...kinda meh. It doesn't fill up very quickly, and when it does finally fill up, it has very lackluster attacks. Maybe it's the low level, but it didn't FEEL like a huge reward for finally filling it up.

Well it usually helps if you upload an image on your itch page for engagement. Nothing wrong with the title screen except for the fact that it looks like a dozen other project's title screens, so it doesn't really stand out.

I like the tile set and character sprites that are being used. 

Let's talk about this battle system. There were a few skills made which seem good at first but you quickly realize when using them in combat(1st person combat traditional turn based) that there was no real chance of winning a battle. The player is given no direction to run away either so it's shocking to get Game Over at the beginning of the game after only a few minutes. On second thought, I think what is actually happening here is that there weren't supposed to be random encounters on that first map at all, but instead this got overlooked. (You can copy paste a section of a larger map into a new smaller map that will allow for a locked sequence event to take place. It will look and feel the same, but allow for you to disable the random encounters. Simply do a fade out, transfer event and fade back in.) Once you get past a certain point, you get two more party members and the combat becomes more balanced. 

The only saving grace is that if you go into the options you may turn off random encounters, which you pretty much have to do in order to play this game. So why is this defaulted on? That's a big problem there. You can leave it defaulted on and use the previously mentioned new map trick. Where that map has no random encounters, or has very very weak ones. (Remember that this point you will only have one party member, gear the battles to that.)

It's probably a better idea not to have your enemies cast healing magic, they already have too much HP.

I've seen the 'skills use HP to cast' feature before (first coined in Paladin's Quest on the SNES from as far back as I can remember), but I found that in this instance it just adds an un-needed difficulty. I would recommend that you just keep the TP gauge and be generous with granting TP, or have those skills also use MP at low costs. The battles are overly grindy. You are forced to keep healing as the enemies also keep healing. It becomes overly drawn out at some point.

" Shouldn't we at least warn her about the 'Big P.' " Lol

The last boss is super hard if you don't get lucky with some critical strikes early on. It keeps growing heads as the fight progresses. I was able to win using every last thing at my disposal. It wasn't terribly balanced, but maybe a bit on the hard side. The last chest is unobtainable, just move it down a bit before the autorun even to fix it.

Overall not a terrible entry to the game jam, just a few minor oversights. Good job on submitting a project, you now have one more thing to show for yourself in your game dev portfolio so congratulations! I hope you've learned a few things and improved your skills along the way. Keep working on it! :)

Please see Teal's play-through video, as well as her review of the game in the video description:

You might want some sort of warning for the player at first (you can apply a temporary no encounter state via a state or equipment, then force a battle) that she isn't strong enough to beat the enemies. Otherwise, the player might think they are supposed to fight.

It looks like the chest before the boss cannot be reached? Might frustrate some players.

The boss just kind of stands there while you think... The fight was kind of annoying with the silence and poison spamming. Poison does wear off after a while, but still annoying to deal with.

Also, you can't seem to do anything else (didn't check items), but you can guard while sleeping?

The fourth character's special is partially useless. It heals ailments, but Encore already does that? So it is really just a full heal for the party.

The optional boss's final text was kind of predictable. Not necessarily a bad thing, but...

The game was pretty short for me. Pretty close to that 20 minute mark.

This game gave me a bit of a SMT feel, though you can't capture enemies like you can in SMT.