I want to preface this with the fact that I really like the game, I think the music was fitting, the scenario was compelling, and there were a lot of nice touches within the art direction that really enhanced the experience. Overall, I think outside of initially weird feeling dashing (which I mostly got the hang over) and wall jumping (which I don't think I ever really did, but I did well enough to progress), this was a really well made game.

I say all this beforehand cause I feel like I might be a bit harsh about the boss fight. The difficulty spike is way too big, and for all my attempts I'm not very convinced I was ever even close to winning. There are a lot of individually cool concepts, that alone or maybe with a couple other of the features would probably make a really satisfying fight, but all together kind of felt insurmountable. 

Starting off, it does a lot of contact damage and it feels like there aren't a lot of i-frames to keep you from going from full to zero HP super quickly. In theory, the high knockback is what keeps it from happening most times, but in return, I sometimes get shot into the pits at an angle that I can't react fast enough to wall jump out of. And when I do catch myself, sometimes the boss is positioned at a point where I can't land again (or else I'll take damage and get pushed back in), and I can't keep clinging to the walls or climb above it because my stamina is running out.

It's pretty difficult to find openings to attack as well. Since your attack range is kinda tiny, you have to get pretty close to deal any damage, but the boss's kick attack comes out pretty fast to punish you (also initially, the black fog surrounding it made it hard to tell that it was a follow up attack, and for my first few attempts I thought I was just accidently running into it after it finished the charge). I thought that it wasn't so bad since I could at least do more damage with the new light attack, but since it's a limited resource I couldn't use it all the time, I wanted to wait until I was sure it would hit since missing still loses me the charge, and the enemies only dropped enough energy to use it one more time.

Finally, the second phase is completely immune to the normal attack, so you have to use the special attack. Which I would have used on the first half of the fight, so I'm stuck running cycles around a faster and stronger version of the boss I was already struggling with, waiting to kill the blue spirits to get a chance to take another swipe at the boss. So after a couple of times trying to do that, I started not using the light attack on the first version of the boss so that I could go all out once the boss transformed, but that means the first phase takes twice as long now, and I'm getting pings from all the extra orbs I'm leaving around since I'm full on energy. 

I did see your other comment about not wanting to change anything close to the deadline just in case bugs showed up, so I assume you might have already been thinking of dialing it back a bit, but hopefully this at least helps illustrate what some of the players (or at least this player) struggled with during the fight. I hope I didn't come off too harshly, because I did really like the game. I really like metroidvanias, so I'll be looking forward to more in the future.

I suck at dash/climb platformers so I couldn't finish this one, but otherwise excellent take on magical girl theme-wise, going into alternate dimension and fight bizzarre to save people's souls. Only her weapon of choice being some kind of dagger didn't feel much magical-girl like (and yeah she doesn't transform, but Sakura Kinomoto shows that a magical girl doesn't need to transform). Gameplay felt good for the genre, although again I suck a bit at it. Music felt a bit repetitive and the character's "combat voice" started to sound a bit annoying, I think it would've been better if there was some "cooldown" before she shouts again even if you're spamming a move. On the other hand yay extensive intro with cutscenes and everything! Very good spritework to go along everything else.

The looks are fantastic. I love how the hair flows in movement. That being said I am apparently too dumb to wall jump which is compounded by the stamina reducing the jump height.

Perhaps make it so that you cannot click out of the screen or give it a full screen mode. Also maybe add controller support as I found the keybinding to be very cramping.

I have a bit of a mixed history with metroidvanias. I've found that either I get stuck five minutes in, or get much further and then get totally lost in a game that's a lot bigger than I thought. For better or for worse, I had the former experience with this one.

The graphics are really nice, with a 16-bit style. The menu is hard to read and I don't think the bitcrushed look works well for it, but none of the in-game graphics have that issue. The music fits well and the sounds are mostly well chosen. I do have to bring up the attack sound, though, it just sounds weird.

I wasn't expecting to see a story section that long or that polished, so I was pleasantly surprised by the opening. I don't know if there are more sections like that but I'd definitely appreciate seeing them. The gameplay seemed alright, but I'm just no good at metroidvanias or platforming in general. I could never master the double jump, fell out of the world a lot, and had no idea what to do about the monster with all the cutty tentacles.

Personally I'd prefer if there wasn't a lives system and it just respawned you where you were, but I think think three lives and then you get kicked back to the save point is a decent compromise between that and a strict lives system where losing all your lives is game over.

Overall, a neat game, but way too hard for me.

The game download is up and running! We've fixed all the major bugs in the export version so it's finally playable. Have fun!