SALAMIC'S PROFILE

I'm going to address the tutorial issue with what you guys have suggested. I'll give the player the choice of seeing the basic controls or not, and also asking if they want a basic explanation of the battle system in the first fight.

I think what I'll do to address the speed of the saving process is remove the Metroid fanfare bit/breaking the 4th wall animation for if the player doesn't choose to save. That would speed things up a bit for if the player just wants to heal. I could also possibly change the fanfare to something shorter/quicker. If I did both of those that would shave off a few seconds and make it less tedious.

The random anime girl is just a place holder picture. There is an image pool where selected pictures would be shown there. I want to turn that aspect of it into a community project where I get other artists on RPG Maker forums to drawn pictures depicting events in my game in whatever style of their choosing. They could also link to their site/blog and would be in the credits.

There actually isn't a shop in the first chapter, in the final area of the first chapter there is an enemy who drops one rarely, but I'll maybe have the player start out with a few or something and include it in the sidequest reward. I'll also make the starting enemies a little less stronger.

As for the style differences, I'm having my friend Kaitlyn draw them because I quote like her drawing style. I gave her more creative freedom in how she stylizes the characters so they are sort of different on purpose. But if enough people find it bothers them/it's weird for them more than anything, I will have my friend also do the battle images to make it more consistent.

Thanks for addressing the issues with the skills, I'll try and balance them out more in terms of damage/hit rate/etc. I'm just always a bit paranoid that I'll end up making a skill 'too good', do you know of any good rule of thumbs for making balanced skills?

I have actually never had Joe's move miss (as I set a hidden state to temporarily remove misses/evasions) but I know how to solve that!

I will change the battle BG lines to dark grey, and if that doesn't look that good then I'll redo the lines to be thin.

The platform script can be found here, but be forewarned it will cause issues with your game. Nothing too big, but if you didn't notice in my game, there is an issue with NPC's interacting with the character. They will also face a different direction before actually facing the character;
http://www.rpgmakervxace.net/topic/6948-arc-engine-realistic-platform-system/

As for your music comment, I completely agree with you. And that's something that I will be doing a lot of over the course of the game. I have a lot of music I plan to use (a lot from lesser known games), specifically in cases where I feel the music would actually fit a situation/battle/etc. in a JRPG.