The skills have an SP cost to equip and you have a limited SP value. The SP bar is right above the skills on the skills equip screen.

Thanks for the explanation. It all makes sense now.

I've beaten the demo. Overall, the game was fun and easy to play, but there was some problems.

Let's start with some mechanical issues. The spirit stat is still messed up. In an earlier demo, spirit was near useless. It appears that you have now compensated by making spirit increase far more dramatical than other stats. However, there's still issues.

You get four spirit if you increase spirit while you only get one attack if you increase that stat instead. IIRC, switching up from longsword to bastard sword increases attack by 4 while switching up to the better wand increases spirit by 20, so here spirit is considered worth five times less than attack. This is close enough to four, but there's problems elsewhere.

The passive that increases spirit increases it with +10 while passives increases the other stats with +5. Here spirit is considered half as valuable as attack. Then there's elemental gems. If you make a steamy equipment, you get the same amount of spirit as you get, say agility, by making a windy equipment. So now spirit is suddenly considered equal to the other stats.

It's rather inconsistent how you treat spirit. My suggestion would be to re-balance spirit so that the stat is equal to the other stats. As a rule, that means increasing the SPI-F of spells to 4-5x as high as they are currently and lowering the power to compensate. Failing that, I think you should stay consistent at how much worth spirit is compared to other stats. If you get four times as much spirit by spending a point in it as you get attack, the passives should also increase spirit four times as much as they increase attack and steamy equipment should give four times as much spirit as frosty gives attack and so on.

Another issue is that the equipment bonus becomes sameich with the status increase option. For example, Becca's Rugged Axe has an attack of 14 while Rain's Bastard Sword has an Attack of 8 and his Leather Shield gives 6 points of defense. Those six points of defense means that Rain has to spend 6 points less on defense and can spend them on attack instead, so 6 points of defense on a shield has the same practical benefit as six points of attack would have. When you factor in that the shield means one more equipment slot to put an elemental gem into, this works greatly in Rain's favor. The only way this can work out in Becca's favor is if she never has to spend any point into defense and Rain also has no need of the extra defense shields provides either.

The same goes with the bonuses elemental gems provides. A Windy Rugged Axe may give you two extra agility while a Frosty Rugged Axe give you two extra attack, but that just means the player can spend four less points in one stat and four more in the other and you get the same result as far as stats goes. The exception is of course steamy equipment. That said, the elemental benefits does of course matter a lot.

Other than that, the maps look nice and exploring them is fun. The story is so far simple, but makes me want to find out what's going on and what will happen next. Characters are also simple, but charming. The game is very easy to play. There are no long cut-scenes, backtracking is fast if you want to do that, and progressing is straightforward. There was one boss that at first provided resistance, but the game gave me good feedback regarding what went wrong and allowed me to reconfigure my characters accordingly.

So overall a good game despite the issues with stats.

Don't know if this has been pointed out elsewhere, but the description for Amrit Drops is that it restores 150 MP. Well, both in and out of battle, I'm only getting 75 MP, which almost caused game over the first time it happened.

Edit
The same is true of the perch, only getting 75MP instead of 150. I'm going to have to backtrack, as I don't have enough healing items with me. Damn.

The License Agreement "Don't Steal this, Yo!" gave me enough of a reason to subscribe to this

I'm playing through it now. I have to say I am thoroughly impressed. The story itself is very interesting to me, haven't been exposed to this kind of thinking. This might be the first review I do. You and captainregal make quite a team. Wish I had a team like that lol

author=DarkBox
will be fixed in the next version.

As there's going to be a fix, are you interested in a list of missing information when you open chests? I've found several where the dialogue box telling you what you've found doesn't appear. If you are, I could pm it to you.

I've finished the game, enjoyed it, and submitted a review. You can't say everything in a review, but one thing I really liked was the joke built in to the dialogue with the suits of armor in the throne room; I was all set to put something in my notes until I hit the last one in the line.