With those mockups, it actually looks really nice!

I can't wait for the screenshot and yeah the Hell River boss is insane. I usually only beat him at level 5 with the best armors of the chapter but even then it's hard unless I do the elixir trick. >.<

Wait, is this a menu-based RPG?

Yeah it's an ASCII-art-based RPG. Towns and villages are menu-based, though.




Also I tried this and so far it seems kinda cool, although it definitively needs major polishing in some areas.

-For example, the game text remains the same color as the maps and in many cases it's very hard to read. IMHO maybe the text could be altered to always show the same amount at a time (eg 3 lines only filling the map area of the screen) and perhaps the same color as the HUD (eg white text on dark blue bg). It could also maybe be moved entirely out of the in-game/HUD area, such as the unused part of the screen at the bottom (2 rows of 26 chars available). Heck, even the battle menu could probably be moved there.
-I think the King's courtyard might be better if the walls are gray-ish, since they're not plants, after all. Also some other palettes seemed wrong, such as the bosses using the wall background color instead of floor's. Maybe use a different palette for the event/boss sprites? Also the river water seems a bit dark so maybe you could make the ^'s white or light blue like Reuben CSE water
-The character is incredibly hard to see on some maps. Maybe it should be always brown or black?
-The title screen is not consistent as it's not full screen like the rest of the game. It's mainly a BASIC limitation, but since the game requires Doors CSE and that the logo code is quite large, you would be better off setting up the title screen in 160x240 mode, dropping the ELEVEN logo and just reusing an horizontal version of the ILLUSIAT XI+C logo. It would also take less time to show up on the slow 84+C display. Else, you could just take the original animation and just use 2-pixel thick lines with 2 pixel space intervals rather than 1 space interval.
-The HUD is redrawn on every map reload. Maybe replace every ClrHome command with For(Z,1,8:Output(Z,1,"                ":End? Like in Illusiat 6/7, you could probably remove the HP/MP from battles and just move it to the new HUD.
-Saving results into an ERR:MEMORY.
-Doors CSE icon?

With everything archived before installing the game I had about 21180 bytes of free RAM. I think the solution would be to always keep LB and LB1 archived unless they are needed, same for LA, LC and LE, kinda like in Illusiat 13. Of course it's impossible to do it to the same extent as I13 without recoding the game but just keeping the battle programs archived when outside battles would already help.

You could also get rid of multiple save files and only use one file, since not many people need them nowadays anyway.

Yeah true, although for that bug, in Illusiat 7 and 9 what I did was using a program to auto-archive/unarchive chapters (when loading a game it would detect which chapter needs to be copied to RAM and when in-game, it automatically switched without launching the menu), but this resulted in the new version of the game no longer being pure BASIC

I sometimes get a memory error when saving on the monochrome calcs. Manually going back (cause I know the internals) allows me to save properly. Probably because the main program takes too much RAM.

Nah it's because the game has many Goto's nested inside For/Repeat/While/Then loops >.<