I understand the difficulties you experienced in making this game, and the short time you had. Please understand that what I'm about to say might hurt a bit, but I'm only saying it so you can improve and you can be sure of what exactly went wrong.
There's a ton of small things in this game that on their own would be minor annoyances, but all together make a horrible game experience.
-The "skipping" dialogue that you say is a problem with the json parser is the first thing that confuses the player. I doubt I was the only one that thought dialogue was skipping and I was missing what was going on due to it, leading me to be confused about whether my answers were even right or not
-The fact that characters don't reply to your dialogue options means that you have no way to know if you chose the right option (other than recruiting them). If you manage to recruit them with 4 choices you're disincentivized from finding a more optimal path, since you have no way to know which of the choices you made before were wrong, which of the new ones are right, so you have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
If you do fail at recruiting them, you have zero way to know which of the 4 choices you made were correct, so next time around you're still choosing completely at random, having learnt nothing. This isn't aproblem for the basic characters that show up often. However, for the characters that show up from lvl 3 and above this is incredibly aggravating. Knowing that you have already lost the game due to not knowing the answers to recruit the only character that can save you at this level, and that you're no closer to finding out, and that you're gonna have to replay all 4 previous levels again, and that even after replaying all that again I won't be any closer to knowing how to progress in the game, is enough to drive a man to madness.
Also, I might just be autistic, but it's pretty hard to get a read on some characters and figure out what answers they'd like.
-Unskippable dialogue means every new playthrough is an excercise in boredom. Clicking through dialogue that you've already read 60 times but being unable to skip it is infuriating, and gets exponentially worse every repeat playthrough. This leads to the next problem:
-The penalty for death is way too harsh, and getting back to your deathpoint takes entirely way too long. Dying kicking your ass back to the titlescreen is a practice that has gone out of fashion for a reason, but makes sense for a roguelike. I think the problem with this game is that it has roguelike mechanics (dying sending you back to the beginning, repeating friends and bosses, etc.) but nothing of what makes roguelikes good. There is no "skill" that you can hone with repeated playthroughs (perhaps remembering answers, but as mentioned before, this too harder than it needs to be), and there is no progress that is gained with each death. With many roguelites "Death is not the end", as said in the game's page, but this is a misnomer. Death is absolutely the end. There is no gain, no progress, no nothing. Dying is a complete clean slate, and this is incredibly disheartening to players. Couple this with the death penalty and it's no wonder most people didn't finish the game.
-Now, I know what you're thinking. Yes, I did keep a notebook, I did write down follower damage, boss damage, question answers and other data. I'm sure this is what you intended, but the problem with this is that the previous point makes data collection not only hard, but grating. The second time I gave up on the game was when I figured out that to know how many characters appeared before the boss in level 4 was to let them all pass and die against the boss, leading me to once again replay everything. I really see no reason to withhold this information from the player, as boss health, follower numbers and damage are all key data to making a choice on who to take and who to ignore.