thanks for your detailed review, i see and agree with all you say, you hit the nail on all the issues. sorry about the loading and firefox issue, i really appreciate that you waited and played. hoping to improve my coding and exporting abilities for the next jam, i honestly feel really bad for wasting people's time. i was a little in over my head. the opening cutscene could be skipped with space but i should've put it in the description.
i agree the shooting is off, what with the bullets shooting backwards sometimes. something to do with the spawn points which change based on the individual sprite, to make it look like its coming from his hand. that would be my first thing to fix as i want the character to handle well.
however i kind of liked the bullet speed change based on the length of the aim (which was an accident, from the non normalized direction as you say), so i kept that in.
i don't really have a defense for using AI here, i tried to figure out what i needed to early on and got frustrated and caved to just asking GPT, which i felt bad about and didn't use after. in this case actually needed the specific degree from the player since i wasn't rotating the player sprite, just detecting where the mouse was relative and in which 45degree section, to swap the sprites accordingly. but there was probably a better solution anyway.