The opening subversion of recruiting the beast rather than slaying it was a great twist and set up the future gameplay systems well! All of the character designs are expressively cartoony and their personalities lent them a fun amount of liveliness. The characters having preexisting relationships which are casually incorporated into their dialogue helped bring the city to life!
I also found the gameplay to be very solid, though with the caveat that I think it may have benefited from a Shin Megami Tensei party building approach rather than a roguelite approach. Slaying monsters repeatedly to build up the levels of the team I'd managed to keep alive felt like the most natural gameflow, with the instances of swapping them out creating this worrying sunk cost fallacy for having invested into that beast which was lost. That might just be me needing to unlearn certain predispositions, however. This system could work well as a mandatory nuzlocke, though in that instance I feel the overall party size would need to be expanded to about 6 or 8.
Ultimately, this has some of the most solid rpg combat gameplay of the jam games I've played so far! It's great to see that you were able to have the story and gameplay play off of each other!