The Horrible? Nononono, you mixed all : GBA, as SNES have 16bit soundchip. Game Boy (and Color) does have 4bit channels. The GBA has a worse sound than SNES because the soundchip isn't the same and is a cheaper one.

FUn fact : the SNES soundchip is a Sony one, did you guess why the GBA doesn't have one? (Hint : PlaySomething contract between Nintendo and Sony has been broken and thus they became "ennemies".)

Three months later, I got a game engine revelation : I'll drop real-time death detection for a "final blow". I'm not sure how I'll use it, certainly something like a multiplier based on Guts at damage/recovery calculation and then the characther will fall. Now I need to balance, so much abuse is possible with such last stand chance (like recoverying each time at 0 hp...)

To sum up : the counter will flow naturally to 0, and once it reachs 0 and with some event, the charatcer will be given a last chance final blow. Else it'll collapse at its turn. And now I just obliterated an difficult obstacle by not overcoming it! \o/
I'll maybe go into the source later. DOn't expect something but I'm interessed again in the game engine.

Crude 160x120 rendering of Reuben battles, missing several elements. Of course this just re-uses old but colored tiles and an extra menu inspired from the papyrus logo in the Reuben 1 readme:



And updated sprite sheet



Now that I think about it, if such game was made it would be a crazy amount of graphic data with all those monsters

Mmh not really. 2^n colors can be stored in n bits. I remember Megaman made by a few sprites. You maybe can outclass color restriction by sampling your sprites in smaller parts (in preference repeatable)

Yes, sprites are more or less limited in colors, yet some devs were genius enough to give us 16-bit visual orgy.

EDIT : Realized that a alone screenshot doens't give justice: learn that the game does uses a clock to track if you're at day or at night (game time, not yours) and change smoothly the palette to give us a neat blue sky, then orange evening and a dark night.

I saw that you didn't want the game to keep its grid intact after you quit and started again the game. That can be easily explained : you're using a part of your program as a buffer (the map), thus you edit on the fly the program's content. That explain what the grid isn't reset each time you launch the game. Fill the buffer with zeroes before editiing it!

When i'm bored at work before starting.