If this game had been finished it would have absolutely annihilated every other submission this year.
The insane production quality reminds me a lot of Arcane Maiden, the winner of the first (2021) FFGJ. Aesthetics on their own go a long way but I got REALLY hyped to play a tactical RPG (I haven't finished Fire Emblem but FFT is my all-time favorite game.)
Regarding the singular, partly working battle, the number of enemies is too much. You did well to have only some enemies engage the party and have to approach others, and not just due to the difficulty - waiting through an enemy phase in which all 30 enemies acted would have been incredibly tedious. I also liked that at least several of the characters had a very distinct identity; it took two playthroughs, but on my second go I was able to find niches where the general, archer, and white mage were effective and it made a gigantic difference.
As you're likely already aware, there are a bunch of game-breaking bugs. Characters will randomly stop being useable as if they already moved, even if the enemy phase has happened. Sometimes units are stuck gray, other times they're stuck at their normal color but selecting them isn't possible (the game thinks you're selecting the ground tile behind them.) Given enough time, these bugs will eat away your entire party until you have no party left to attack with, making the bugs a greater threat than the actual enemies. I even tried downloading this game and playing it in Flash Player offline in case these were Ruffle-only issues (I REALLY wanted to play this game...) but they continued to persist on both platforms.
Other bugs mostly include gibberish text and add to the confusion of a game that already has a lot of variables without explaining them to the player.
Excepting the bugs, I think the best improvement to make to this game would be to slim down the party size and size of the opposition for the first battle to make it easier for the player to learn their own arsenal. Perhaps one close-range, one long-range, one support, and one cavalry character would be a good, diverse cast without overwhelming the player (especially since the graphical distinctions between different characters are going to be lost on a new player that thinks they all look the same.) To this point, having allied characters flash a different color from enemy colors would also be useful, as I occasionally got confused as to which ones were mine.
Also, one of the features I liked about FFT was the ability to attempt to use skills even if there were no targets in range. This made it easy to see how far a ranged fighter could reach BEFORE moving them, allowing you to keep from wandering unnecessarily deep into enemy territory.
Absolutely awesome concept and the execution is almost there, but it looks like this game massively overscoped for the time given.
