wowowowowowow this was an incredible read, this'll be sloshing around in my head for a long while. Also in a technical sense it left me very curious about the process behind the 2d/3d mashup.
Glad you liked the game! The 3d model of the world was constructed in blender. Animation was mostly done quite sloppily (due to time constraints) using blendshapes. The textured surfaces use images from old japanese asset discs, proc gen/noise, or were illustrated by hand. Each shot was rendered out, compressed in photoshop, and saved as a gif. A high res frame from each shot was used as a backdrop for illustrating the characters. I was hoping to intentionally make the styles and resolutions clash a bit. Thank you for the inquiry, hope this helped!