Shard Saviors is without a doubt the entry with the best presentation of this jam, not only is the art, music really high quality but they are really unique. All player character being blue and enemy characters being red gives it a feel of cohesion with the game sprites. Also all Shard Holders have unique portraits, giving a feel that each enemy is unique.

The tileset are is also incredible, is simple in nature not trying to hide the grid at all and most terrain being "a single tile", there are no conecting forest, mountains or anything, even the roads don't connect properly to avoid breaking the grid pattern.

And the writing is top notch too, the premise of civilization depeding on some sort of magic crystal that shatters (also everyone looking stonish like) and that then needs to get back put together is a great interpretation of the theme. 

Also,  the characters interactions were fun and I was really looking foward to recruit more guys, beacuse each conversation was such a treat.

 All that being said, while the gameplay premise is really good, and the use of "advance wars roads" really helped backtracking, I think the team run out of time to give it a second pass or balance it out.

The map is really big, but the only enemies (at the start) are the lonely shard holders around, at the start is alright since you have few units, but it never really scales, while you get to build an army to march around, shard holders just stay put waiting for their demise. The reinforcements that target your home castle make sure you need at least a couple of guys left there to protect it, giving at least a secondary objective to just marching on.

Also, I'm fairly certain that all weapons and items, outside of dark eruption are the default items that come when creating a new project, another thing that ties into the not-scaling of the game, you don't get better weapons or items at any point.

And by the halfway point, characters just started joining with no dialog. 

I'm hoping for some later updates to add the missing dialog and see if a second pass makes the last half of the game more interesting.

Overall, the game is great in all the things related to presentation and theme, but the gameplay loop never scales in complexity besides marching to kill the next shard holder, wich makes the last half an exercise in patience more than anything. Still I'm holding my hopes up to see how this turns out after a few updates.

My stream of consciousness thoughts while playing:

• cool font
• cool artstyle
• like the menu sfx. could be a bit louder, I thought there wasn't sound for it at first
• nice original music
• cool narration box and cool dialogue box and cool portraits and cool background art... honestly the presentation is a total banger
• nice use of \at command to have characters interrupt each other, underrated. I think a longer wait would be better though, like when ki talks about "the M word" when there's no way you could've read livra was about to say "mercenary" in the previous line. Like, \at[30] or [60] would probably be fine (edit from later: this bit does get a little overused)
• I like Ki, very funny
• super cool tileset and ui. the unit window looks sick but I have no clue what any of the information in it means (edit: oh looks like it's atk/def/res/AS. cool)
• oh and just realized it has the range of the weapon next to the weapon's name?? that's SO sick
• portraits for the enemies are also awesome
• kind of a confusing start. not really sure what I'm supposed to do. just started walking east and fighting the stationary enemies. takes multiple turns to even reach one of them. not a great start
• there's some spanish in the combat forecast telling me to press C to do something?
• ok the swamp tiles hurt. would've been nice if the ui said that. i have a plugin on my github (terrain details) that lets you show more info about terrain in its hover window
• when a player unit's in the bot left corner they get hidden by the unit window when you hover them. should make the window flip sides depending on the cursor location. Stopped being an issue once I disabled mouse controls tho
• yo... just realized movement stats are big and normal tiles impede it but roads don't. That's cool. Good backtracking measure
• "I think she's more likely to kill herself than any of us" SHEESH
• oh and forts heal too. I honestly forgot the vanilla UI doesn't tell you that, got too used to using plugins
• I like that you can mark individual enemies. I do wish you changed the "all range" color to something besides the vanilla piss yellow tho lol
• somehow I completely overlooked the village right by the starting area. didn't know what they looked like until I visited the one with bismal in it. a "focus location" event over the village on turn 1 would've been good
• realbattle seems to be vanilla animations only so I'm disabling it, hope I don't miss anything cool later but I can tell this will take a while even without needing to sit through combat
• zyman is funny
• maity's dialogue is great. all the apostrophes are in the perfect spots. nice name too
• what's the point of the port that appears after defeating the enemies in the southeast? can't visit it. the soldier that spawns in that corner of the map doesn't even spawn on the port tile
• was about to complain about the 2% crit the horse mage had on Ki but then she got a 5% crit on him so what can I say. Lots of low% crit throughout but thankfully I never got unlucky
• there was no cutscene for tek, he just appeared when I visited the village. that's too bad
• so it seems like the goal is, leave a couple units to defend the home castle while the rest traipse across the land. I like some of the individual ideas but man there are tons of dead turns
• the city on the north edge of the sandy area isn't visitable
• lytomi super struggles to keep up with everybody. feel like his heal staff should be stronger than 10 hp for how annoying it is to have him keep up
• wait the fortress just south of the unvisitable village is itself visitable, did these get switched up? it gives Ajerdo (with no cutscene)
• what does spd do? game doesn't seem to have doubling, so is it just an avoid stat?
• the enemies seem to scale much faster than my dudes. everyone gets 2hko'd and tend to 3-4hko back, need to slowly enemy phase most of them
• on the save screen the world map looks pretty impressive tbh
• speaking of saving please get the plugin that enables you to save regardless of whether anyone's moved
• can't visit the village next to the bridge that opens up either. I think this backtrack point opening up is pretty sick though. I think I understand now what the port in the east is going to be used for later
• no recruit dialogue for fakt either. are we done hearing from the characters? :(
• fakt doesn't have a portrait in his unit window
• that being said fakt is so much better than lytomi it's crazy. 13 mag vs 0, he can actually capably heal. granted I didn't realize til now that they could use tomes if I bought one for em
• can't visit the village east of fakt's hometown
• markyjoe's smooth scroll plugin would've gone a long way to beautify this game. the jerky vanilla cursor and camera is really hard to go back to
• the very last shard holder for me is the death emperor, and he can't even damage Hohum
• finished in 48 turns. took me about an hour and a half
• aw man it's the kind of end screen you can't proceed past. well gg
• never did find out what the port was for

Closing thoughts:

I never used the strong healing. Feel dumb for not using it, you get 2 free ones for 6 uses and it could've sped up a couple sections if I'd used it. Never knew I was a dirty hoarder

Never found out what the spanish text was for, so I DeepL'd the text and it seems to be the "check enemy skills in forecast" plugin. But no enemies have skills. Strange

I only ever bought 1 dark eruption and 1 healing item. Durability's a nonissue, even Ki and Bismal who I used the most still had durability in the teens for their starting weapons at the end, so I didn't need to buy refill weapons and the shops just didn't have anything particularly cool. I could've bought a weapon for Fakt or Lytomi I guess, only real thing I would've done differently

Aesthetics are gorgeous. Having an original soundtrack for a jam game is so great. Map theme got a bit repetitive for how long the map took, maybe could've switched tunes at some point, but that's no big deal. Character and UI art are both fantastic, and I love the tileset. Even its simplicity (e.g., doesn't have big sprawling mountain tilesets, just single pieces) adds to the charm

The idea of, "cross the world in 1 large map which evolves to become easier to traverse as you progress, meanwhile your ever-growing army needs to spread out across that continent to protect your home base" is a really awesome concept, and the idea of rebuilding an already shattered empire is a great use of the jam's theme

But god damn there is SO much walking in this one. Was this inspired by death stranding? Walking for ages, trying to rebuild society? That'd be funny. But yeah the moving enemies were more of an annoyance than a threat since they don't target you (which is fine on its own!) and the bosses hit so hard that the only strat I had was to wait next to them on EP or pick them off from a range they couldn't attack from, so the game was walk, wait, walk, wait, while I had 3 or so units goalkeeping the start position. I feel like better movement mechanics could've gone a long way, maybe something like rescue, or being able to use map features like the port or something to cross sections of the map quickly. Also the game kept adding new ways to backtrack, but I didn't really need to do that very much myself, so it just benefited the enemies. Which isn't a problem, but it would've been neat to have reason to return to base sometimes. Or maybe that would've slowed the pace even further. Hard to say

The exp curve was a little punishing for earlier-joining units. "Falling off" is too harsh, but they were definitely never as good as later-joining units since they need multiple kills to level up and there aren't really lots of kills to go around (except for the base defense crew)

Character writing was really fun. I'm sure time constraints were why there was almost no dialogue in the second half and I think that's a huge shame - that's one of the game's strengths. "Well we can't sell these artifacts of power now, so we might as well use em to rule the world ourselves" is fantastic, and everybody was funny. Just wish I knew what goofy quirks Tek, Fakt, Ajerdo, Delicia, and Hohum had too

I enjoyed Shard Saviors! Thanks for making it :)