the art on the story graphics is soooo cute!! there's this weirdly timed pulse at the start though but yea, very cute style. the overworld style is less polished but in a charming way at least. i like the border and shadow stylization on the boxes. i would've liked the viewport to be bigger so i could see everything better, particularly action text with the key inputs and hp/ap info were hard for me to process and remember so i had to look closely at them every time. wish the key inut boxes that appear on obstacles could've been used for the action circle too.
the controls are, hard, and don't feel great to play for my toopid brain. i feel like just the one input for a character to dodge would be difficult enough from managing multiple at once. but it's also kind of weird that Z X C V correlate to different characters in one part and different actions in another, my brain has to switch gears every time and i end up not feeling like trying different actions because they felt awkward and i didn't fully understand what they did. my strategy ended up being try to group all the characters together so i could just try dodging them all at the same time, but that didn't work for long and doesn't seem like the sort of loop you're going for.
after talking to the shadow monkey in overworld i thought the game had freezed but i guess the dialogue box was just positioned partly off the screen so spamming keys got me out of it. still the game does crash a bit much, i kept trying to play it a few times so i could make a more comprehensive review but when i crashed again sometime during shadow monkey fight i wasn't really feeling the gameplay to defeat buff all over again. thanks to your description though i can give you more points for the apparent solution to the boss fight being quite indicative of the theme.
oh yeah and i was expecting the game to be more of a slap-off, per the name "palslap" which, besides being a palindrome, i don't particularly understand what it means.