Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We are planing to rework the tutorial to break it out a bit more, though story-wise, having them all leave from the town together fits better, so we won't be breaking them up further unless the story evolves in a way that it feel natural. Our game design is heavily story driven. We originally had all 4 together and broke them up so the tutorial was just 2, as you see now. We will try to shorten some of the text and only go over the basics, but at the same time, people still miss a lot of what is said in there. Currently you have all the abilities in your first fight, so we want the player to know how it all works, but if they can't retain it, then something clearly needs to change. We certainly need to reword the description of how items work, as you are not the first to not understand how to use them. The Slimes eat items to enhance their spit abilities. All of their abilities, attacks and healing, are based on their spit, and that is affected by what they ate. Even the human equipment they collect as loot is eaten by them to power up their spit abilities. The tutorial is definitely a WIP, and will be getting updated after we do some tweaking of the Slimes' abilities.
In the story we do have a difference between the stats and abilities of the characters, which will become more obvious as the game grows. Some in your party are older and more experienced, while others are meant to be very young and on their first adventure. For the current state of the game we have kept the skills closer together, but will be expanding the range as we do better balancing.
We have the icon of who is speaking in the dialog. I'll need to look into how feasible it is to add them into the text. Trying to get them to look good without making the line too tall is probably going to be a challenge. The slimes might fit, but adding icons for humans would be taller than the text. Similarly, we don't have the names currently due to wanting the left side to not get too wide. We are looking at options to fit the name of the speaker in.
We do have plans to improve the combat to add more variety. We also have plans for being able to heal and consume items between fights from the inventory screen. Still, the combat is a big part of the game, and much of it will be traveling between towns or other points of interest with regular combat along the way. Combat is going to become more common as the game progresses, and the distance between towns longer. There will be other elements to the game, but if you don't like the combat, the rest probably won't be enough.
The combat animations and SFX will getting a significant overhaul. We are in the process of switching from public domain assets that were static to our own art, so that we can do more animations for the various abilities. We will be adding audio and visual FX to make each more distinctive.