Another beautiful sprite-based game from you!
The art is great as always, and I love how intentionally little of characters you showed in cutscenes! It still looks great, but it felt very Hanna-Barbera-esque with little of the characters is visible and how little movement there is of individual features. I loved it!
The sound was also very well done, had that old arcadey feeling, admittedly for the most part didn't feel very SBIG on that front with the exception of the stereotypical Japanese/Ninja trill notes that play every time you click in a cutscene. THAT was a funny little feature even if it was unintentional.
As for the gameplay, it is interesting having to play as a realtime character alongside turn-based NPCs. The closest I can think of as an analogue is switching between realtime and turn-based in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. And while it is neat, I admit it really starts to wear on the fingers. I did appreciate the whiplash ability allowing me to oneshot the small enemies though.
As for the big enemies I feel like they don't have enough hit feedback, sometimes it felt like I wasn't doing anything to them at all, but I clearly must have been.
I also had no idea at any point what the bars on the bottom right meant, I assumed they were some sort of powerup charge since it went up as I attacked but didn't seem to do anything?
I admit as someone who also sucked at explaining some mechanics in my entry, I know it can be rough to epxlain everything succinctly. But yeah some explanation of how those worked would have been appreciated.
But overall, the game functions well, and it has some good juice to it, if a bit obscure on how some of the mechanics work. First playthrough my party died at the end boss, second playthrough I did the same thing but my party memebrs somehow levelled up more than the first playthrough and we beat the boss. I don't know what the difference was lol.
Great game, but I agree with your response to other comments, you should work on tutorializing, or make the actions and related UI a bit more self-descriptive.
Overall though, another banger!