Oh my god.. I feel like just every trop that came to mind was pushed into that ending. Like .. wow.
THE EVIL WAS NEAR YOU ALL ALONG. The initial EVIL was GOOD.
You fight SHADOW SELVES. POWER OF FRIENDSHIP. LOVE PREVAILS. CHILDHOOD FRIEND LOVE. MAGICAL END REVELATION (because hints are impossible to pull off)
TEAM MEMBER knew all along, but waiting to REVEAL IT ALL!
.. and of course you end the game by the protagonists confessing love to each other, practically.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.. where did all of that come from?
AHEM.
It feels like it was dragged on for longer than necessary, with plot twists that have no real setup or investment to make it work (it honestly seemed like there just wasn't much of a guiding idea until later - and I can see the challenge, the beginning was 100% kept ambigous, so nothing solid you needed or should pursue).
It is the classical trap of "revealing everything at the end".
Be wary of it. Beginning and end should NOT be the only parts where you find out what you're doing. Hints. Hints everywhere. There's memories and minds. Play around with it lots! You could neither foresee, or make sense of it looking back, and thus none if it felt important or connected to your gaming experience.
The fighting's not all that important if you have nothing to get towards. There were 4-5 passages with little input inbetween.
That .. was weird. I did like the overall ride, the second part definitely shifted towards a more light-hearted tone in writing with the few opportunities it took. I was okay with that, altho it was a concrete change, haha.
Hmm the first time those poison-attacks pop up their damage (not the poison actually) is really high. Since you can revive you can get by even without antidotes if need be. It was the hardest section of the game due to the high damage of that poison spell, not the actual poison. It is also the only time you can't return or have access to the workbench. That's tough luck! Thankfully the system makes you prevail always, it may just take a lil longer.
Later spells are reallly strong, but need a long time to setup, so unless you use items, it's a lil iffy. It does make you use your spammable attacks tho. (the last battle was also really easy due to blinding + muting enemies)
The problem I see with the battle system really lies in the length of the game (it's short, but it still feels like it was too long) combined with the lack of item use on your warrior, the parry heal is really low and needs to be spammed before big fights in an encounter so you can actually heal up later on.
You need a lot of recoup time for the strong spells, and generally inbetween so it's more of a focused "get to max" before continuing thing, rather than something that breaks up the general gameflow as it did earlier.
The fact you can't use healing items on your warrior means your mage will do all the damage later, because you will spend half your time in random encounters (well, on-touch encounters), using parry.
There's other stuff. The general advice is - more stuff inbetween exploration parts, and more hints in the game world. Was a lil exhausting towards the end (you also have waaay too much ether later on, I had 5k or so over and just bought some of everything and still had way too much)
The ending doesn't seem to be a parody either and it's a lil too much for my taste.
I really would've liked to have seen you take the "falling apart" of her mind a lil more serious and actually built on it.
With all that said, great job you two! It did come together well. Sorry for being so harsh on ya. Especially picking up is tough, so much love to you frogge when I focused on your part.