I'm not worried about spoiling you, I'm worried about spoiling other people playing. >_>;
But sure, I'll just talk. If anyone else following this topic wants to avoid spoilers, then don't read this post.
Anyway, thoughts on the game through end of the thief town(I played more~).
Character/Story Notes
Everything here is pretty solid, easy to understand and follow, pacing moves well, characters are at least vaguely interesting and the other classmates mostly have gimmicks that make them memorable enough for minor NPCs. Dunno how much role any of them might play later, but it works.
Only o_O thing is Icebird's name. When her parents have what seem to be perfectly normal names. And in fact nobody else at all seems to have that style of name, so it stands out as out of place. My suggestion would be to give one of her parents a similar style name, so that even if nobody else in the world has names like that it at least comes off as consistent with her family.
Gameplay
Core gameplay system works well. I like the scrolls as low-powered versions of the MP costing spells. The ability to change scrolls in combat would be nice, but with how you setup the retry system I can understand why you didn't. As in many games, so far speed feels like the god stat, I'll see if that continues being true down the line.
I will admit to facepalming when you get the Scan spell and the very first things you get to fight after that, you scan to see the weakness of and the weakness is......the only element you don't have! .....yeah. That was kinda lame. Also Icebird being named, well, "ICEbird" and her card being Ice element and she starts with....Water and Fire. Makes 0 sense. Why not start her with Ice instead of Water there? It fits every other thematic thing about her plus avoids the above mentioned facepalm moment.
Swamp area: .....this area cheesed me off. Bad. Suddenly, you stop regening after battle(you are at least told this will be a problem), there are damage tiles on the ground(you are not told this is a thing that exists, and the damage tiles don't look like anything obviously damaging before you walk over them and find out the hard way), and I wandered around awhile before realizing you were supposed to walk over the turtle to proceed.
But all this pales to one fight I got in with the herons. Where Windbro got silenced....and could not take a turn. The lack of a skip turn command was really glaring here. While silenced, Dayang couldn't cast a spell, couldn't use his scroll...my options were use a consumable of which you have a very limited supply and nobody even needed one at the time, or run away. I could have won that battle just fine attacking with the main's knife stabs and having Dayang skip turn until he needed to use a healing item or something, but that wasn't even an option. And what would you do if you have no consumables to use? Get silenced, forced to run because one char cannot take their turn? I'd really suggest either letting scrolls be still used with a massive power down so they are effectively useless during silence, or adding in a skip turn or defend command.
Thief town was fine, hunting for the hidden item amused me(+1 for out of battle scan use, by the way. Plot/gameplay integration, yay~), it was a good spot for more lyte snap to be played, a break from the annoying swamp section, nothing else really to comment on.
More comments later when I play more of the game.
EDIT: Since on a reread I feel like it comes across as me not liking the game, I'll clarify a bit. Overall, highly enjoying the game. It cannot be overstated how hard it is for games to get pacing right, which this is doing with both plot AND gameplay. Pacing is probably the single biggest strength of the game right now. Even when you have to redo a battle 3-4 times to find a winning strategy(or just to avoid RNG screwage), it doesn't feel like a slog because the game plays at that great speed where it's fast enough that battles never drag but not so fast that it feels hard to keep up. You hit the sweet spot for battle speed without making the game boringly easy, which is hard to do. I'll probably consume the rest of the content the game has right now tomorrow and will look forward to further releases.
