MZ - I'm new. Be gentle.

You've specifically asked for feedback on whether the story makes sense, so I'll try to focus on that, but I'll share any another thoughts I think might be useful.

Beginning
There is some weird issue with how maps are displayed at the start - they blink for a split-second and then they're gone, and you just have to wait for a little bit with nothing happening (potentially relevant - I am using a 165Hz screen).
Though even if they showed for the entire duration, I don't really recommend showing the player images by making them look at them for a specific amount of time - you can use a transparent message with no text as a "wait until the player presses OK" command that allows them to look for exactly as long as they wish.

So, I was told the king himself might help me get back home. I'm wasn't sure why the ruler of the kingdom would be bothered with something like that, but I was intrigued to find out why.

The castle felt more like a large house than a castle, with the king just randomly wandering around in an area that looked like a kitchen. Well, he's surely not your typical medieval monarch. I was looking towards to seeing how interaction with him would play out, only with him to ask me... if I'm ready for a quest? What quest? We didn't even get a chance to ask him about the whole "help with getting back home" thing. We're just suddenly, for no apparent reason, running errands for him.

You could definitely expand on his dialogue here. Have some conversation about what would it take to get back home, have the king explain that the kingdom has some problems and needs help, maybe showcase his eccentricities a bit and tell us what he's doing in a kitchen instead of managing the kingdom.

And speaking of the castle, I initially went through the huge sci-fi looking doors in the centre, and found some wild herbs, only to have the king say something about them... even though he wasn't in the room, and I haven't even met him yet.

Before heading into the castle I took a quick peek at the foresty area nearby, and snuck through the maze a bit and managed to grab a potion. Sneaking out didn't work so well, and I ended up fighting a zombie. And I also went through some trees later, so I arrived at the castle without much health. This led me to keep searching around it for quite a while, trying to find some way to heal. I eventually decided to try exploring the world map more and found the town with the inn, but it would be nice to have the king also suggest the inn at the town if the player has low health.

Also this list should probably have the red names redacted if you didn't fight them yet, since it is rather spoilery.


The first quest
After going to the town, I slept at the inn. It would be nice if this interaction had something else to it:

Since we've met before, I'd expect either her or the protag to in some way acknowledge this in dialogue, but that didn't happen.

After resting I tried talking to some of the NPCs on the street, only to realise that somehow they're all muggers. That is a rather staggering amount of muggers. If there are so many, and there's no town guard of any sort, I wonder what's stopping them from just going into people's houses and robbing them there. Or robbing everyone during the daylight too, they seem to outnumber the town's residents.

In general, the amount of muggers in this game is so high it's rather comedic, and I kept wondering whether that's intentional or not. There's more muggers in the streets than non-muggers. There's muggers in the forest. A weird zombie-filled maze? Muggers. A strange abandoned tower filled with powerful monsters and without a single person in sight? You guessed it - muggers.

Though, ridiculous as they were, it was rather satisfying to figure out that with my HP I can definitely defeat two of them before I need healing, and two of them will drop just enough gold to heal back up, plus XP and other loot.

With a new day and a full health I went back to the castle, defeated the zombies, and got sent to recruit a party member. I also got a really OP sword, that meant all the enemies I was fighting so far no longer pose any threat. I guess I should have waited with exploring that maze.
Again, it is very poorly explained why the king is doing this. Why does he trust a random fisherman from who-knows-where to handle this, rather than his own guards?

Now a few levels stronger, I decide to explore the maze, and found a stranded villager. He wants to get to a swamp next to the town. I think? I don't remember exactly. But I never managed to find that swamp, so I eventually just got him some gear and he became a second member of the party :p
He does learn abilities as he levels up, so I guess he'll probably join the party more officially later anyway, but I've managed to speed up the process.

Also you probably want to delete the fallen down sprite first, and then add him to the party, so we don't end up with two of him ;)

(and also that dialogue doesn't fit)

I managed to find the next party member, who wants all my gold, so I beat up some muggers to get 10k (I previously spent some on extra armour) and buy a fishing rod.
Side note, why don't I already have a fishing rod? I'm a fisherman who was out fishing before the storm, but somehow I'm carrying around a sword, a buckler, even an "enemy radar", but not a fishing rod?

So, fishing involves interacting with water, waiting, and then obtaining a fish. Not even a reflex-based "press to catch", or different kinds of fish. I'll be rather blunt here: I don't think this adds anything to the game. Fishing minigames can be a nice break from regular gameplay and allow you to relax a bit, but doing absolutely nothing is just plain boring. If your players want to stare blankly at the screen where nothing happens there can already do that at any point just by not moving anymore.

And I'm really not sure how do you expect anyone to do this quest (unless there's a different, smarter way around it).


Second quest
The reveal of our newest party member being the king's edgy son was quite funny.

It would have been nice to hear some justification for why the search took 7 years so far. What did he try? Why didn't it work?

Anyway, onto the battle tower. The zombies are really easy to defeat. But they sure are annoying - you can hardly move here without triggering a random encounter, which seems to happen about every 10 steps. I'd highly recommend giving them twice as much health but making them twice as rare. At least. Maybe even do it 4 times.

The chests seem to magically turn into differently looking chests when I open them. You might want to check "Direction Fix" on those events.

The problem starts with having to dodge the shade encounters. There's generally a reason people either do random encounters or in-world encounters, but not both. Because sneaking through a 3 wide corridor, with an event randomly moving through it, and where you can at any point get stopped by a random encounter and then immediately drawn into the shade fight does not feel either fun or fair.

And I'm not sure if it's intentional, but the shade fights seem unwinnable. They one-shot most party members and two-shot the protagonist, while barely taking any damage themselves. At first I thought this was a scripted fight I'm meant to lose. Apparently not.

If you wanted to make stealth sections, I'd highly recommend making them separate. In areas with no random encounters, and with shades causing immediate failure, rather than having to play through an unwinnable fight every time you run into one.

As it is, this felt frustrating enough for me to call it quits.

The itch page
I do have to mention that - those images don't look like they had much effort put into them

And are also just quite hard to read.

You have your game's description to mention points like these - you don't need to also put them on screenshots. And if you do, you'd probably want to have part of the image responsible for showing text, and part responsible for showing the game. Doing both in a single space means neither of them looks good.

Overall thoughts
I really liked the open world concept of your game! Being able to randomly go into a forest and sneak past some zombies to get an item (or a new party member) was really neat.

And I liked the early progression - from wondering if I'll earn enough gold from defeating enemies to pay for the healing I'll need because of them to being able to do so rather easily. And it's nice to get to level 2 after a single encounter and get a skills already (though I wish that skill was more useful).

I think that nice balance broke when I got the OP sword from the king - there wasn't a single interesting fight after that, since all of them were quickly resolved by holding spacebar to make everyone attack. And of course shades wouldn't be beatable no matter what I'd do.

And then the battle tower was frustrating enough to make me no longer want to play anymore.

There are some really good parts to this game - I hope one day I'll get to play a version where the other parts are too ;)

And I hope this feedback helps you in your efforts.