Lots to love in this! I would run it. Great job on your first release!
Usability:
- Overall this is a great springboard for an adventure, though I can see the GM needing to do a fair bit of fleshing out in certain areas if the players decide to really dig into it.
- For instance, in the Dorani Town I can imagine players trying to steal/heist the cosmic sphere instead of risking the Steelblade Cup. As the adventure is now, this would require the GM to completely synthesize that material. Also having some detail around the beastforged encampment sieging the town would allow players to raid/disrupt it.
- Similarly the beastforged outcast hideout could benefit greatly from becoming a keyed location. This would also let you increase the amount of treasure, which is something you noted as being on the scarce side.
- The adventure seems bottlenecked by requiring flight to reach the head in the sky. It would be good to add more than one solution to ensure there isn't a dead-end.
- Illustrations of the monsters would be helpful, particularly the custodians, which I had a hard time visualising.
- Wilderness map is a little hard to use; what is adjacent? Maybe break it down into a grid?
Formatting:
- You've achieve a lot of good things vibe-rise with the formatting, but it comes at the expense of usability. The 8-bit landscape background is a bit distracting from reading the text in certain areas, and could benefit from being toned down significantly in contrast.
- The magenta header colour is a little fuzzy. Toning down the saturation would help.
- The bestiary layout is a little confusing with the beastforged stats being broken away from the core description.
- In general the layout gets a little loosey-goosey to fit things in, I think if you broke away from the NES manual page size, or increased the page count and introduced more structure to the formatting it would be a good thing.
Inspiration/Vibes:
- Great work! It feels not only in line with the material, but has a very 80s vibe in general.
- The steelblade minigame is a cool unique challenge.