My first impression based on the screenshots was that this was going to be one bland game.
But quite the contrary! The controls are nice and smooth and the fantastic music gives this game a unique, relaxing atmosphere. It recalls early 90s SNES music in the best possible way. There's also quite a bit of content for a 2Mbit game. My only two gripes: Falling down stairs after climbing to the top and the last boss is extremely hard, I was just barely able to beat it after way too many tries. Maybe I missed something? Overall, a fantastic submission!
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The music ended up like that mostly because I wanted to be a cheapskate about the memory consumption on the sound side (with one exception (at least for what was used), that being the snare drum, it's all small BRR files just a few blocks at most, and I took advantage of hardware glitches to get different sounds out of the waveforms, along with a few hand-crafted ones here and there), and the Terrific Audio Driver allowed me to do just that not just with the samples, but also with the music data. For added fun, I also used an FM-like effect in both the Title Screen and Credits songs to produce a glockenspiel-like sound. And because I'm being so cheap with the memory, this also means I could use the highest possible EDL value if I wanted to, which I used for the Title Screen song.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
The boss needs more iteration to get the timing and difficulty right. It's a lot easier to defeat the boss with projectile attacks compared to melee attacks. Maybe that's what you are missing? I wanted to add a room that required the player to shoot projectiles and destroy targets before a door would unlock (so the player knows about the X button) but didn't have the time to code it.
I leaned towards a slightly more difficult boss over a very easy boss. I guess I got too used to the boss when deciding it had 6 health points.