The core issue it money. We switched to full time game dev about a year ago, and this is our first real game that we need to release to try to sustain us as we continue. It has grown much bigger than intended, and as it is, it is not working. We are caught in between several areas and not good enough at promoting to draw enough interest in what may be too niche of a project.
Based on the feedback we have gotten, the story is too heavy and long for many who like the combat and want faster gameplay more fitting with the side-scroller style. Those who like the deep story and want to explore more of the world feel limited by the movement and ways to interact with the world and want to be more immersed in it . Switching to a full JRPG is a big undertaking, and would require a lot more time to do, but does feel like what we need to do to create the game we have in our minds with the full story. We don't have the time for that, so are looking at alternatives. Rather than picking one style, the reason for our questions is that we are thinking of forking the code and making 2 games in this world setting. We will take the side-scroller movement and combat and create an endless or roguelike. It will have much less story, but will be based somewhere in the same world, to allow some shared world building between the 2 games. This will allow us to reuse some of the art and character designs to help get both to completion without starting fresh on a new game. The main game will then advance more slowly as we build out new systems to make it feel bigger and allow more exploration and depth to the experience for the player. The current story would stay with that version. We do have a larger story planned, and that story is what drove the design to become more RPG-like and story heavy.
On the art, we are doing our own art for the game. The characters are already being designed for 4 directional movement, so it won't take much to finish them up for the free roam movement. We were already considering enabling it in the towns anyway. The big thing with art will be needing a lot more of it for the world. We will need interiors, which we don't currently have. The rest of the overworld art will need some work as well, but won't be too bad. We've done games with roaming around so have an idea of some of the issues we will need to deal with.
Thanks for taking the time to continue discussing this!