Alright, I'm back, beaten the boss, unlocked the new girl, here's some extra things to consider or forgot to mention:
1. The new girl's skill is pretty good, pairs well with the WG path that I have chosen for her right now (I mean, if you highlight this path on the title screen it's almost as if you were obliged to try it out ;))
2. Update on the chibi portraits issue: they do in fact show up, but on level 50. I think you must have made it so that the game simply checks if the current character level is divisible by the appropriate growth stage - so stage 1 on level 1, stage 5 on level 25, stage 10 on level 50. The thing is it doesn't work that way if the growth stage increases every fifth level, see the table below:
| Stage | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| Level | 1 | 5 | 10 | 15 | 20 | 25 | 30 | 35 | 40 | 45 | 50 |
3. Another thing about saving, that I forgot to mention, it looks like on loading it doesn't load the scene you saved at, but the scene before, so if you saved at the forest (for example) after being home, after loading you will start back home, rather than at the forest, unless you start doing some trickery, like saving at the fishing scene, so that you may load at the forest.
4. Finally, getting to the final levels is absolute grind (go figure) which is compounded by the relative uselessness of the sandwich at the later stages of the game - not only does it heal too little to be useful as a healing item in the wolf's den encounters (or some higher level beach ones for that matter), its' XP boost is so small per single item (in comparison to the XP granted by defeating enemies so that the boost may be substantial), that you have to basically do what I did, which is buying them in great amounts, fighting in the forest, and then spending multiple turns eating sandwiches to get that bonus. This I think, highlights 2 things. One, is the lack of stronger healing / XP boosting items after the sandwich. The second, is the lack of an ability to use items outside of combat. The former is obvious to solve: appropriate items need to be added. The latter is also simple, an ability to use items out of combat should definitely be considered for future updates, preferably with the ability to use more than one of a single item type at once. This could be part of the the whole inventory overview idea mentioned in my previous post.
I think that's all for this update right now, cheers!