My main goal with the combat was to make a sense of struggle. I really liked the idea of the characters getting gradually more tired as it goes on. I'm very glad to see that it resonated with you.
I really don't know how to feel about the story, the last two days of the jam was spent on that. I've been writing for a while, but it was mostly just dialogue (I'd go into a unique word counter, and characters names and 'said' are ALWAYS the most used words).
Before this game the characters existed, but didn't even really have designs, just vague descriptors on top of a personality. So this was pretty much my first time actually forcing myself to describe stuff. I definitely wasted a bunch of words describing stuff that really didn't need to be described.