Well, this was a nice surprise this morning! It's been a long time since I've heard anything from this project. Glad to see you saw it through! :)
Some of the similarities to First Fantasy are rather striking, including the UI layout, battle system, and even the style of humor. Yet there are some nice touches that I wish I had thought of at that time - like green and red highlights for stat changes. The story, though, definitely makes this its own game. Either way, I'm still very flattered that you took inspiration from FF!
And now for the actual review, with far less comparisons :P
I'm impressed with the depth of the story. Not that I have ANY knowledge of Chinese myth, folklore, or history, but it does seem like you have a lot that you pull from here, both in terms of the breadth of folklore and your knowledge about it, and the popup text is great for learning more about a subject - but it's never required (yes, that's a good thing). The popup manner of that text, though, is odd - you could have skipped the popups and implemented the text into the game window itself somehow. I don't have a problem at all with user-initiated popups, but I've been here long enough to know that some people simply just love their adblocker.
Art is fairly minimal but what's there does its job, I suppose.
Music is just about exclusively piano and ambiance. Not too memorable either. It seems like more Chinese-sounding music would have gone great here.
The battle system is solid, and easy to get the hang of, with a couple exceptions - cultivating qi is basically a way to ensure death never happens if you start early enough, so it might have been wiser to limit that capability. Similarly, there is no penalty or chance of failure (at least in my experience, even though the tutorial says it may fail sometimes) for running away. And this was a problem in my game too (actually, a WAY bigger one in my game), but when you attack with the same results as the previous turn, sometimes the text won't change at all, so you don't know if you actually attacked. Some feedback would be welcome when attacking, even if you miss for that turn.
A more visual movement controller would have been nice too - for example, if the 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right' buttons were actually arranged like arrows or something (like Halsaban in FF 1.1). Just for us visual people. Especially if the button text shifts a lot.
I think that's everything I have right now. I like this, and I'll be looking out for a Part 2!