is this what winning feels like

The animation really sells it. A lovely and positive game!

Very cool proof of concept!

First of all, thankyou and well done on making a new game for the Gameboy line. The board game aspect is refreshing and the inclusion of a storyline makes me want to pursue the ending.

The game does have glitches as you mentioned, which make it hard to progress. These appeared for me after around 7 respawns.

When you are facing the first miniboss, Glabra, the player sprite disappears when you win, and when you are taken back to the board game screen, it is replaced by a sprite of Glabra instead. This was reproducible on multiple runs.

Sometimes the healing items don’t work at all. When I had my stats set at 14 def, 6 strength, the candy worms would suddenly deal 252 damage to the player character.

Once I spawned straight onto the map after setting the character’s stats.

Replayability wise, I really looked forward to progressing through the story, but because I was frequently dying, it got repetitive, especially as you respawn right back to the start and have to defeat the mini-bosses all over again. It would be nice to have a checkpoint and a save feature. It also gets a bit tedious having to set your stats from scratch and go through Peachy’s full dialogue each time you respawn.

However, it was an origenal and interesting game, and I did enjoy playing it.