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(+1)

I think this was the most difficult game in the jam for me. It took me around 3 hours to complete, but I chose to restart from the beginning at one point to improve my resource management.

Dealing with each party member's unique mechanics is overwhelming, and the amount of money you get to spend on healing items is so low that you are constantly forced to fight battles in suboptimal conditions (leaving status effects uncured, or leaving characters at low HP or dead) and judiciously spend what I viewed as your "main resource" (the Elemental's MP) to end fights quickly. 

Because the resource management is so strict and battles are so dangerous (and don't award any resources, unless you count Mimic forms), it felt like there was no room to backtrack other than just loading a save, and you really had to plan your route in advance speedrun-style, after learning the structure of the game through trial and error. When I found the character by the tower who wants a Golden Bones on my first run, I felt like no matter what the reward is, it couldn't possibly be worth trying to run back through the cave again (and I don't think I had enough dampeners/stabilizers to make it back with the bones anyways). Instead, after restarting, I planned things out so I could go directly to the tower after my first and only visit to the cave.

On my first playthrough, I didn't realize the pub let you heal characters until after I killed the forest and cave witches, which made the game even more stressful, as it forced me to rely on purchasable items and certain Comedian forms to heal status effects. I made it to the top of the tower and killed the first boss there, but I only had one character alive and died shortly afterwards. I didn't have the resources to safely deal with the devastating status effects from the tower midboss, and I foolishly had only saved after already spending my gold from the cave witch, so that's why I decided to restart. 

On the second playthrough I ended up spending a lot of my money (including the extra Golden Bones cash) on Sound Dampeners to skip all non-optional fights in the tower, as well as Focus Pills so deal with the mass distraction, and I stopped by the forest on the way to get a couple of those anti-curse Fruits. All this planning helped me make it to the final bosses in much better condition. The final bosses went down a bit quicker than I expected, but it was still quite a tense finish (I spent all my money on avoiding encounters, so I had very little healing, and I had no idea what to expect from the last fight). I feel like it makes sense to have the final bosses not be ultra-long or ultra-hard since you'll often be entering those fights in a suboptimal state, especially if you don't restart the game to take a better route like I did.

I imagine there's a lot of room for optimizing your step and encounter routes to e.g. trigger the Comedian form that can cure distract and curse at the right moments, or ensure you have a full-powered Moon Beast for important fights. But I was so overwhelmed already that I mostly ignored this aspect and just tried to complete the objectives as efficiently as possible, hoping that would save me enough resources to get through.

Very cool, tough, overwhelming game filled with unique ideas.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience with it! Hopefully it was overall positive despite how overwhelming it seemed. I'm really glad to hear how it shook out for you because a lot of your story is exactly what I was aiming for it to be, and the parts that didn't work for you the way I intended them to are valuable to know because I think that's actionable feedback for a version 1.1. I'm especially pleased to hear that you decided to use the info you gained on your first run to start over and make a new attempt with a clear plan in mind. I haven't played your entry in the jam yet but it has been flagged for me specifically as something I in particular will like, and from what I gather it's going to be tense and crunchy and have careful resource management. So if you thought mine was cool then I'm counting this project a success! Thank you!