I like the opening scene. Nice and custom title art, the song choice is good even though it's very familiar. Is this default? A re-make? Not sure but it's both familiar and different. Maybe it's a default slowed down? Anyway, the options are plentiful and I appreciate you letting me pick my font and sound files.
The menu is simplified and the music in the first scene is good. Thank you for including chain, the duck that heals the party for free. The default attack has been removed and replaced with sets of skills and the battle numbers are very low digit. I like these changes.
The walking sprites and enemy game scene sprites are all customized and super cute. The enemy battlers look hand drawn, but maybe they're from a DLC pack, I'm not sure but they work in the game.
The battle system is pretty simple to understand, but not that interesting. It's a first person battle system with very few skills. All of which use built in animations and sounds.
The maps are not really that impressive or interesting, but they serve their purpose I suppose. The story is super weird and hard to follow. It feels like I turned on Crunchy Roll* and found a random anime that was in the middle of the season and just started watching.
*: Crunchy Roll is an online television service like Netflix, but it has a very large selection of cartoons and Anime.
Side note if you do include a character that's smoking a cigarette you will have to label it with the ESRB when publishing to some platforms.
You should adjust the blow smoke puzzle to reset the stars if the player blows smoke out of order. That wouldn't be too challenging since there are only four stars. The way it is now is stupidly easy, even for a person who is not a fan of hard puzzles.
The battles are not really balanced right as you get into the ship. No matter what you do, unless you just get lucky with RNG your characters are going to die. You can only flash once without running out of MP, (Flash should be an AOE that stops them from attacking if you can only use it once or twice).
The acid doesn't really seem to help much, maybe have it also deal a little damage.
The numbers are just a bit off, maybe increase the player's max HP a bit and you'll be in a better place.
Another thing you could do in-between combats is revive any characters that died. Maybe just give them 1HP because the way it is, starting them dead and locking the battles to the story, means some people won't be able to win at some points. Thus soft-locking their save file.
At some point we get a 4th party member but then right as the next fight happens, she just disappears? Not sure why she doesn't join us in combat. That would have made the balance a bit better.
Every time that you go back to the inn you have to read through that NPC's dialog again. I think you're missing a page turn in here. That should happen because you have to go back to the inn constantly.
Every screen transition into the next area you have all the followers clipping through the wall and it looks bad, but it's a small thing.
There needs to be a heal spot in the next area. In case you just guess bad. Four stars and three chances. If you pick the wrong ones you get attacked, if characters die then you can soft lock in some situations.
The puzzles are not even puzzles, they're just guessing games. Not fun really. Now I'm stuck too.
Too many dead party members and I keep failing all the guessing games.
Overall it's not the worst experience I've had in this jam. I like the custom bust art and there's plenty of it. The music is picked decently, the sounds are fine, but the battle system is weak and not really fleshed out. The puzzles are not puzzles, they're poorly designed guessing games. I think the story and art may carry this title, but without an overhaul of the actual gameplay I'm not sure how far it will go.
Good job submitting a project for this game jam, I hope that you've leveled up your developing skills in the process and I look forward to the next thing you produce. :)