Hello!
With the ability to heal between battles, I managed to go quite far in this playthrough. I reached Wildemore where you fight a bunch of cult. This point is actually quite intriguing but it took me roughly 1 hour to get there. I feel like the in-between towns are too much and I find the fights tedious. When I got defeated I felt too tired to try again and decided to write my thoughts on the update.
The tavern and inn interactions are nice touches. As with every other RPG, I am usually compelled to talk to every NPC so I also did that here. But most of the time, the dialog still doesn't seem very interesting (yet). I guess it will be polished in the future. For now, it is a good start. One note I've got here.. every town you pass through seem to have a little bit of townspeople doing slightly different thing. But because of the tavern/inn UI, they're blocked. So as you can see in the screenshot below, you can see the silmefolks playing card on the bottom side. But once you open the tavern/inn/training-hall UI, they get blocked by the UI.
Since most towns have the same background and structure arts, I actually look forward to what kind of different NPCs activity when I reach new town. There is also a town where kids are playing balls and I find it charming. I kinda wish the UI doesn't get in the way of it.
Seeing Jessie and James as a couple in the bar to interact with also put a smile on my face :)
Regarding the item stacking... it is an improvement from the last version. However, I still feel the amount of options too overwhelming. For the first few battles, I was willing to assign items to which party members. However, after 5+ battles, it just feels tiring to do so due to the sheer amount of options. So Again, an auto-assignment will be a cool feature.
Since everything is based around on loots you gather, everything is crammed in the inventory making it overwhelming very quickly. I guess that's why in other RPGs, consumable-items/skills/spells/equipments have their own category.
Also regarding the items, some icons don't feel intuitive. There are the elemental berries that deal damage but has apple icons. And there are also healing berry. I would assume that apples/berries will heal you, but they don't here, so the icons feel out of place. Similarly, there are healing potions that heal you, and elemental sample that deal damage. Their icons look the same but act differently. I guess you can tell if you look closely at the icon background (blue for healing, and red for dealing damage), but it would also be better if the icons are also intuitive.
That's it for now. Overall, I think it's a slight improvement from the previous version. It is a big game and even slight improvement requires tons of effort and time. So you did a good job and keep it up!