Thanks. Examining things and interacting with characters in RPG Maker games is my favorite feature too. I normally make games focusing on story and characters, which is why the story is strong. My goal for this jam was actually to keep the premise very simple so I could focus on mechanical aspects like finding loot, upgrading gear, quests and adding battles and I really appreciate your feedback on it.
I'd only worked with battles very minimally before and even with having minimal story and using default maps, did not get much time to experiment on improving them. My default fighting method was to use Spark until I had enough TP to use Dual Attack, which kept things a little interesting, but I get what you mean. I think the fact there was only one character made even the "easy" battles too long and there's less skills to play with per turn. While I added skills for levels 5 and 7, Jade levels up so slowly even though I tried to increase the XP of monsters that in my final playtest, I was only level 4 when I fought the rat king. In my post jam tweaks I'll upload soon, I've reduced Jade's stats so she needs less XP to level up, added bigger XP increases per monster and reduced monster's defenses so battles are faster. I am also adding a lot more gold, since it apparently was scarce. Thanks for your input :)