Wow, looks very nice and old school! I assume that you use double-buffering to make screen update instant, right?

Looking awesome!
Suggestion: Have movment not bound to tiles, that'll make it look more awesome!
Or is that possible at all with that screen?

Only horizontally. Vertically would give around 8 FPS or less.

Yes. With the horizontal scrolling features, all you need to update when scrolling out is the new row of tiles and the character sprite location, while for vertical scrolling, you must update the entire screen content.

7-8 FPS would be decent for an RPG, but it would look weird if the game had choppy vertical scrolling and smooth horizontal scrolling (although the NES Zelda had this problem too in dungeons )

Also, if it didn't use double-buffering, the draw-in effect would be so intense (even in half-res mode) that when you move vertically, it would look really weird, like if the map was glitching out. I remember trying to make a BASIC scroller that did that once on the 83+SE and the effect was really annoying .

By the way, by speed affecting the rate of attack, I take it that this is an action-RPG like Zelda/Secret of Mana, right?

Try to not make the combos overly hard, though. If you ever played Legend of Dragoon for the Playstation 1, a tool-assisted speedrun played frame by frame was pretty much the only way to pull off the later combos and in some cases, it would cost you the fight. On the other hand, Super Mario RPG combos were a little too easy.

And yeah I think it was a mistake in the early Illusiat games to make the character miss so often. Granted, the attack rate was pretty high since it was 90%, but I should have made it so you can't miss more than once every 3 hit, because it was pretty frustrating to miss three times in a row. Spells had 100% attack rate, though (except in Illusiat 1 and 2 where it was magic, not attack, that could miss).

I also tried attack combos once in Mana Force 2, but they were really hard to pull off.