Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We really need to work on the tutorials. Our current ones are disabled by default due to feedback that they were too much (too long, too many details all at once). There used to be a training fight in the large area in the first town that walked you through combat with your opponent being a Slime teaching you. Each turn it would unlock you next possible action and have you use it. This was with the old combat system, and was not updated for the new one. Then we added the popup based system that points to each section and explains it. As new systems were added those got a bit too wordy, and too many pop ups in a row for some people, so they were turned off by default in a recent updae. We also have the Training Hall. That used to be in the Town UI with the Inns and Taverns. We had some comments that some people felt like they had to read through all of it before leaving town, which made the intro too slow. They were in every town, but if you missed that part you may want to do everything, and that could make it feel too much, especially for a jam game. We moved it to the menu so you can access it from anywhere hoping to give players more freedom to visit it at any time to read up as they were ready. We clearly need to find a better balance. I think the popup tutorials are probably still good, but we need to cut them down. Part of the issue is that we support so many inputs and talk about them and the different ways to do things. I'm looking at changing it so that the player picks what input they are mainly using and want as the basis for their tutorials.
The main change we are talking about for making it a JRPG is the movement/how you interact with the game world. Right now we have it on rails with your characters mostly moving to the right, and interactions done through menus. Switching to be more JRPG style would involve allowing free roaming to explore the world. You'd wander around town to interact with NPCs. You'd walk outside and explore the world, fighting random encounters. Things like that. We feel we will be better able to present the story in a way that works for a larger audience, and make the world feel more alive. It will both offer a gameplay style people are more familiar with, and help to breakup the text with more player control.
We have discussed updating the travel system to allow picking what fork in the road to take, with options for more risk/reward. With our recent changes adding the AP system we still need to balance the drop rate of items, especially early game.
Thanks again for playing!