Really great feedback- thanks so much!
It's funny because "what does gold to" is a recurring theme- one of those things through QA. Gold is to the princess as bombs are to the rebel- we just forgot to account for the fact that gold often has a purpose in games and since we didn't call it out explicitly, it completely lacked fundamentals here.
I think the 'true objective' is to romance one of the options, hence either bombs or coins. Monsters are just... there. Originally ideas were had for the ghost girl for them, but we had to cut them for time.
No harshness taken, we both have full time jobs and were glad we were able to submit what we were as two programmers. Ultimately our risk of choice was a narrative one, with a subpar combat system; but it fell short of even subpar haha. Ty for all this! Really appreciative.