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Early game the combat is pretty simple and the difference in items is minimal. The special attacks are more powerful, so saving them for tougher foes can be useful, but the current content is short enough that the final fight is the only real tough fight. Defend is not meant to be a commonly used ability, but is one of those things that is a staple ability so we added automatically, even if it may never be used by some players. The Guardian Ability is meant to be both part of defining the character of Tanko, and more likely to be used over defend if one of the Slimes is low on health and you are not going to be able heal them enough that turn. Even that is still not going to be a common ability, but in some situations can be nice to have. We will continue to work on refining the combat to try to give a greater feel of differentiating abilities and characters, though that will likely feel more prominent as the game progresses. We also plan to add a hunger/fullness system that will impact what to eat, as items are also going to gain other effects. That is still a WIP as we balance out all the ideas we have for it.

I like the idea of the fade for some of the early bits to imply travelling a greater distance without making the player endure a long sequence of nothing happening. Later you will be having random encounters more often, including non-combat events, and we just skipped some of those for the first bit to imply travelling a distance from town before running into the invaders. Having it feel further away would better fit what we wanted to portray. 

Plenty of people don't read instructions, tutorials, or even any dialog when playing games, so we do try to keep that in mind and work to make things intuitive. However, in earlier jams we had a number of comments saying that there was too much, some people felt overwhelmed, and that they'd like the first combat to have fewer characters, so we created the tutorial based on those comments, but also added an option in the settings to skip it, as well as making sure our dialog boxes can be sped up with clicking. We plan to add an in-game option to skip the tutorial when you get to it as well. We will also be revisiting the tutorial to refine it. All of the items and abilities should have tooltips on hover. The inventory screen recently had an overhaul and not everything there has tooltips, though some of that will get them in a future update when we add a tutorial for it as well, and a toggle for showing them as needed. We'll see about getting that tutorial skip option added sooner for future jams for players who like to skip tutorials, but did not check out the settings.

Thanks for playing and the feedback.