Always good to see more retro-inspired entries in these jams! ARPGs are a bit hit or miss for me, though generally the closer a game is to classic Zelda or the early Mana series the more likely it is to hit.

Overall this one left me with mixed feelings; for each cool idea, there's an odd decision design that undercuts it, and when combined with some of the other friction points I would say that I spent about half of my 90-ish minutes of playtime at least moderately frustrated at one aspect or another.

I felt like this game was at its best when the player was allowed to explore and incrementally discover new items, locations, etc. without being gated by the occasional super powerful enemy, deadly environment, or some other hazard that made the area in question unexplorable until "later". Sadly, later also didn't come for me, despite leveling up my Attack, Defense, HP, and Mana to values at least moderately above those of the starting Hero - progression was just a bit too slow, re-treading the same few areas just a bit too unrewarding, and the slow trickle of new goodies not quite compelling enough for me to commit to continuing my adventure.

Ultimately, I think it's a mistake to make the first Guardian so darn powerful. I wasted a LOT of attempts on that guy before realizing he had at least 50 HP and probably wasn't intended to be defeated at starting levels. So that made me question why the forced backtrack out of the dungeon was necessary, and by the same token why the dungeon itself had a forced backtrack built into its puzzle / gimmick. I haven't really come up with a good answer yet as almost any scenario I can think of winds up at the same conclusion of, "make the dungeon just plain linear and cap it off with a somewhat easy tutorial boss", which would help the player establish a feeling of momentum (as opposed to one of being brick walled the moment they unlock combat).

Combat itself does need some work, especially things like funky collision, inconsistent i-Frames, and some unfriendly enemy patterns. But the rough spots might be more manageable if the Hero didn't start off quite so flimsy. While I do like the concept of literally farming upgrades, it also slowed down the pacing a bit in a way I wasn't super keen on, and put an extra layer of padding between combat and the progression earned from combat. The names of the upgrade plants were super cute though!

The pixel art has a lot of charm and is generally solid for the style of game. I'd suggest redoing the inventory icons, though, as they don't use the same pixel ratio as the other assets which creates a "mixels" issue. The retro audio I was a bit less impressed with, not because the music or sound were bad, but they just felt sparse - somethings didn't have sound effects that I think should have, and there was no boss music, for example.

I'd also agree with a prior reviewer that the unintuitive controls could sour some players, and while having the key bindings listed on the itch page is nice, I feel like that info should also be available somewhere in game. Also an option to rebind keys would be great.

Critiques aside, I appreciate what this game set out to do, and I think with some refinements and tuning, the adventure-sandbox concept would absolutely resonate with fans of old-school, exploration-heavy games. Good luck with the rest of the jam and I hope you get a lot of useful info for your project!