Forcing the player to restart from the beginning if they die is annoying and cringe, having to manually restart the fight with a long animation while alive is a terrible workaround because it robs the player of close calls since it's better to restart the fight than to risk having to go back from the beginning and fight the lizard again.
The combat itself is cool, I think it's a bad idea to have one single move that boost damage because it kind of stifles combo potentials if you want to keep the damage boost on at all time but other than that it's satisfying.
I wish you could cancel the backswing animations by dodging or moving.