This was a pretty hard game... but I did manage to beat it! I scraped by on each level, often ending with only a shred of health left. I just BARELY beat the first boss. Strangely enough, the final boss was quite a bit easier than everything that came before it.

The different transformations are cool! That's a good concept that adds some variety to the gameplay. I do feel like the platforming could use some work. It's very floaty and clunky feeling. It didn't always feel like I was in control, and this makes some of the jumping/dodging sections feel harder than they should be.

Graphically, it works well enough, but not everything matches perfectly. Some of the sprites seem to be at different resolutions, and it stands out a bit.

I enjoyed the story, especially how blasé they all were about it. (Oh yeah, we battle all the time. It's cool. Attracts tourists) That was a funny touch. The dialogue itself was a little rough in spots.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game, even if it was very difficult! I'm glad I managed to beat it though. Nice work!

OK, I love the different transformations, each with their own abilities and attacks, which are all fun to use (you could have a little note in the tutorial that you have to hold to combo, not click repeatedly) . Especially the phantom form, which has the amazing kunai teleportation and a double jump. It's just super cool, such a great idea. I wish I could use it against the regular enemies. However, there are a few problems I had with this game. Such as...

The boss of stage 1.3

I couldn't beat this boss. Form 1 does useless damage and you only use it when you are out of mana and have to kill some goons. Form 3 (the best one) is also useless since it only works on the phantom enemies. Form 2 is your only option for damage, and with the limited defensive options the boss and its minions would always reduce my health to zero before I could recover my mana bar for the second time. The bats would always reliably damage me with their ranged attacks while I tried to get close in form 1, or while I was charging my Level 3 attack from afar. 

After many attempts, I still wanted to see the remaining three stages, but I wasn't about to lose my mind against this boss. So that's where I quit.

Verdict

The attacks and abilities are great in their own right, albeit with slightly clunky controls. The enemies aren't very fun to fight against, and the levels don't do much. For a jam game, it has some very fun core gameplay, it's just that there isn't much more than that. I think it just needs some better music, sound effects, more forgiving enemies, and polish.

It's an interesting concept let down by the general unresponsiveness of the combat. It's buggy as heck, but the biggest problem is that stuff doesn't seem to happen when you actually press the button. Jumps are floaty, but more to the point, even in projectile shooter mode I'd be clicking away and only like 1 in 4 clicks would result in an attack, or even in the attack animation restarting properly. The two goddamn bats on the second level turned into my worst nightmare because their projectiles were near unavoidable given the floaty jump and they tanked an unbelievable amount of magic shots for a couple of bats. I do like the transformation idea but the first and foremost rule of almost any action game is that it has to feel responsive to player input, and this doesn't.

I don't if it's just me but I find that melee combat just doesn't feel right as your character dashes into the enemy and takes damage while the enemy also doesn't get knocked back. Evading bullets is also impossible so you will always take damage.

The transformation is a very cool concept.

The Phantom Menace makes me think of Star Wars Episode I. Which came out over 20 years ago. Now I feel old.

The concept of being able to transform with different attacks effective against different enemies is a solid one. I'm not sure having melee and ranged forms is necessary; it might be better to just have normal and phantom form effective against different enemies.

I do like that the story is presented in game and the writing is fairly competent.

With the disclaimer that I'm at best ambivalent toward pixel art out of the way, I think there are some good pieces here but a few issues with the presentation that really hurt the aesthetic. The biggest is that scaling isn't consistent, so some graphics have huge pixels (like the UI, which is horrendously stretched) and others have much smaller pixels (such as Sakura herself). There are also some visual artifacts (Sakura appears to have a border or fringe) and possible compression issues (avoid DXT1/DXT5 like the plague for pixel art, BC7 is better but still can butcher things). Even if the assets themselves don't change at all, fixing these issues would make the game look dramatically better.

I don't know if I was missing something or just suck at this kind of game, but I found it ridiculously difficult and didn't make it past the third enemy. I'd expected these enemies to be mooks that would die quickly, but they took tons of hits to kill and I'd lose a big chunk of health in the process. I found combat to be clunky in general, and the seeming lack of effectiveness of my attacks didn't help.

The main menu music is super nice though.

I feel like my game was running too slowly? I'm not sure, but I felt like everything moved half the speed I wanted it to. and it took multiple attempts to get the different transforms to work. Might be an issue on my end.

That said, I like your core concepts here, and the character sprites are good. I think you've got a good direction if you choose to go further with it.