great and thoughtful reply! I will give you my context and let you in on what I knew needed polish but didn't get any
there being a map is part of the vision I had of the mini-rpg I was creating. In the end, however, my available time was spent tweaking the main game logic and audio/visuals, leaving story and context out to dry.
For example, the pixel art was slapped together and was trying to both feel good and off-putting. One thing that I did not like was the player having to hike through 7-8 screens where the enemies are no longer relevant to get back to the hard fight, and the most obvious solution is to have a teleport or shortcut once you've reached there, or to have the respawn be close to there.
The applause/cheer bothers me now too. At first it was funny and I was ready to attend to the rest of the game. It's kinda grating though, being a bit loud and frankly rude lol. As well as incongruent with the atmosphere.
Something you didn't mention but which bothered me was the background in battles. It's fine, it isn't too distracting, but I also intended to have a few different backgrounds for battles for variety. In fact, my Original idea was to have a background that resembles the world around you but "first person", and which would also rotate when swapping from your perspective to the enemy's perspective. But I never attempted to draw that with the other things needing doing.
I loved this fun challenge. 5 days felt much better for getting this done than 3 would have, when a lot of time was spent remembering or looking up how to do things such as blit a sprite with an alpha(transparency) value, set up a sin table, save map data to a json, and several other code things that will go much quicker when I have done them more.
I'm glad you enjoyed it and that you notice the Nubby inspiration, though it was not inspired by Nubby directly, rather Nubby harkens to an earlier time in programming that I remember. One I played as a kid was "Ultizurk III: The GuildMaster's Quest," which was one of many Ultima-inspired PC RPGs that existed. But also this game was more directly inspired by Knuckle Sandwich, which itself is inspired by Earthbound. So anyway, I'm not extremely attached to that genre, but I do enjoy some amount of RPG mechanics.
So TL;DR I had a grander vision that I knew I wouldn't be likely to achieve, but I also had no idea how far I would get.