Having made this kind of game myself for this jam (and am quite sad to see a game so similar to what I made), I am greatly impressed. Your presentation and mechanics are better, and you included things I did not have time (or patience) to include. Well done.

Exactly the sort of game that's in my wheelhouse.  Give me that Final Fantasy Tactics or Shining Force goodness any day.   The game does feel slow, and I ran into an error before I could finish it:

Other than that, I was enthralled, and plan to play it again. :D

Excellent entry, very truthful to the original hardware even in ways that may be detrimental to the overall experience. Your dedication to the craft is remarkable.

Also, always a pleasure to see a fellow Gamemaker user, it's a powerhouse when it comes to making tactical games very quickly. 

Flawless presentation, good look, good sound, very gameboy-y all around. The palette problem when trying to identify enemy ships show exactly why lesser men were so hesitant to make tactical games for the original game boy. Your slow, letter by letter, tutorial really brought me back to a time when I would follow dialogues religiously on my small dark screen, trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing. I really hope your get first place for "Gameboy soul".

Gameplay is very nice, but it has some strange quirks. Cycling through weapons and ability with select was a bit weird and would feel even clunkier on an actual game boy. Getting sent back to the level selection screen everytime I pressed start without any confirmation prompt was also a bit annoying.

All around marvellous work. Nicely done.

I love your art style, it looks great, especially the shopkeeper! The gameplay is cool too; it gives me a tabletop game vibe. Watching the enemies take their turns step by step is cool. The only thing I would to say is that the gameplay is slow. But honestly, slower pacing is just a hallmark of older games. Good work.

This game was probably one of the most entertaining and well implemented entries for this game jam so far. The game play is very engaging, and I love how the opponents do not play around. The visuals are really good. It really gives that gameboy vibe with the music as well. I had a lot of fun playing the game, the only thing that could improve is that the enemy turn will take a lot of time, especially at the later levels because they have a lot of ships. Fantastic Job 

Overall this game was a lot of fun once I got started! I wish there was less text to read at the beginning since it took so long that it started to getting boring.  Maybe finding a way to minimize it or space it out more would be helpful! However, once I got through it and figured out how everything works it was a lot of fun trying to figure out where I should place my ships to attack but minimize the risk to my own.

what an awesome game! The sprites and tiles are great... and of course I love the shopkeeper. she's very good.

The only downside to the graphics is that there's no alternate palette to the enemy ships and while I didn't find this a problem for the first half of the game, the last three maps in particular often had my formation mixed up with the enemy's  

Anyways there's really quite a lot packed into the maps that are here. I had to pause the game & pick it back up the next day because it was too much to get through in one sitting. That's a good thing!

The final stage was really quite difficult. In a game where I felt like accuracy had basically not been a factor up to that point, I felt like inaccuracy was really tanking some of my attempts. In particular, I felt like it would have been great to be able to rely on fire bombs to help clear out the brigs, but at 60% base accuracy it became too risky to attempt. I'm not really sure why a weapon that deals damage so slowly has such a low accuracy (I don't imagine fire stacks with itself? although I didn't have the chance to try) when Naval Ram hits most of the time. In addition, I felt like it was really not worth using most of the Abilities besides healing on most maps. I think I got one good use out of the Frigate's Second Wind and in one or two instances the Brig ability to block a naval ram was great.

The Sloop's evasion just seemed really bad for the cost. If I compare it to other strategy games, for example SRW gives your squishy units Focus which is +30 ACC & EVA and can typically be used 3-5 times starting from the start of the map. Obviously that's a long series with its own approach to balance...... but I couldn't help but think of it when I was staring at the ability screen

Unfortunately I don't think I have the patience to push thru the final battle. The ability for the enemy team to gang up on one of my units with 10+ damage plus a stun on top of a 1/5 chance of any of my attacks missing (with the exception of my own MOWs) made it feel like the action economy was heavily in their favor. I had had a lot of success with "let them approach" strategies up until that map, but on a map with only the strongest ship types I couldn't see a way to remove their units fast enough to not get overwhelmed. The closest fight I had was one where I sank The Avarice before it could fire the stun shot but it left me without enough resources to finish the fight... that was a slightly bitter feeling, especially since in games like Fire Emblem "kill the boss" is a map clear condition, haha. After all that I'm curious what the recommended loadout is - I had Frig/Sloop/Brig/MOWx3. The Sloop was useless but I wasn't sure how best to replace it. Swap to Frigx2/Brigx2/MOWx2? argh! at least I can tell it's a good game because I'm still thinking about the problem after closing it.

All-in-all, I think it was the perfect length to be memorable and explore all the content that was available in the game. Making a SRPG for a jam seems kind of crazy. It's awesome!! Nice work!

This was a really solid entry, and the opening crawl was really well done and got me excited for the game as a whole! The game itself reminded me a bit of the board game Plunder, as well as Advance Wars. 

I think being able to move after attacking might add some complexity- because you can only move before attacking, I ended up falling into the general strategy of mostly waiting around the starting area and having opponents come towards me, and once they were in range, I didn't find much incentive to move around much, instead just attacking. When I did try to go on the offensive, I ended up losing a significant amount of health, but that's maybe a skill issue resulting from how I chose to compose my fleet? That said, I don't know if allowing post-attack movement would ruin the game's balance!

 Also, I think a tile that acts as a wall that blocks attacks could be good- I didn't make it to the last couple of levels, so maybe that is a mechanic that I didn't encounter. Another smaller suggestion is that having the 'water' tiles animate with moving waves would add some visual interest and increase the presentation of the levels.

I know this sounds critical and I'm just spitballing here, but I had a really good time with this, and I could tell that a lot of love and care was taken in making it. The music and presentation were very well done, I liked the shop, and including an in-game tutorial was very appreciated. Good job all around!

i used to play thracia 776 and thi games is too unbeateable, please fix it

Oh, nice art and music. Love tactics, it's quite challenging with stock ship. I really see myself playing such kind of games. Good job!

Sweet game! I see the resemblance to Fire Emblem (and a little Advance Wars too) You could 100% pull some mechanics from both of those games for even more strategy options and horizontal decision making no problem.

A couple recommendations if you are so inclined! Perhaps a reminder to the Player that there’s a Shop they should be visiting regularly? (I thought the “S” just meant Start for a bit) Also a way to skip the tutorial would be super handy (booted up game again, but had to go thru it once more)

Regardless, thanks for making a cool little strategy game, and great job!

The GBJAM scroll reminded me of the Nintendo logo when you boot up a Game Boy, and the music and text sounds felt very of the era. It was an immediate nostalgia kick. Top points for Game Boy Soul.

The graphics are great, cutscenes and gameplay. I found the game soothing and had a lot of tactical depth. If I could get this running on an actual Gameboy I would play this to wind down at the end of a day. (and probably stay up later than I should with a one more turn situation). Really awesome entry, and I think it deserves a lot more attention and reviews than it's had so far. If it was hosted in browser I think there'd be a lot of engagement with it.