Oookay let's see... I played this game to finish... it was long :'D
I like the main story. That's a very interesting start; a reverse isekai I might say, I love that concept. It certainly can be made better but I think for something made in just a month it's okay XP
What is commendable is the amount of content you fit into this game in just one month. That's one long story with a lot of features; must have been a ton of hard work.
In general I also like the turn-based combats. The balance is towards the easy spectrum but more or less it's not too easy and I still had to think to play this game.
The character arts are also pretty good... for the portraits and cutscenes anyway they are impressive.
I however, have a great deal of criticism for this game:
- A lot of content is impressive; however, perhaps it is exactly due to the huge amount of content and features existing in this game that it lacks polish. It seems to me because the content is so huge, not enough time was done to polish each and every part of this game.
- The sprites for one need some improvements. It is not the biggest problem however; the biggest problem is the inconsistent artstyle existing in this game. Some parts of this game use pixel arts while other parts are less pixel-artsy; and for the pixel arts their pixel sizes are inconsistent.
- While I did say the story is okay, it can also have some polishing. I'm not really a good writer myself so I can't give any advices, but there are moments where I felt the story is somewhat all over the place, unnatural, sudden, etc. For example, Melony's internal struggle of confidence and leadership; it was only brought in the beginning but never mentioned anymore in the second half; almost like that thing was forgotten.
- Perhaps I should've clarified this better; but what you have here is a turn-based combat game with a romantic subtext in the story; not really ren'ai game which is defined as a game where the primary goal of the game is to establish a (romantic) relationship between the Player Character and one or more of the NPCs as defined in TVTropes, or as an alternate looser criteria for this jam defined as games with routes for relationships with characters (which include single route games as to include all games that should fit the TVTropes definition) -- this game is not either of those; the relationship is not in the mechanics of this game and felt like a side story. I do realize however, that your team definitely was trying to fulfill the genre, and perhaps simply misunderstood as to what fulfills the Ren'ai genre for the purpose of this jam; for that reason I'm not going to remove this game. What I cannot do however, is to give a high rating for the genre mashup category to this game... for that I'm sorry.