Very cool and substantial game that has obviously had a lot of heart put into it! I love the design of the main character, especially after finding the green armor. All the animations for the player look great and the controls feel really nice and snappy. I think it speaks for itself that I promised myself to spend a maximum of 1 hour reviewing a game this gamejam, yet in the end I stayed up all night playing this one!
There is a nice sense of exploration and player power from finding powerups. The weapons and abilities were fun to use, especially after finding the burst upgrade, but at the same time they were definitely very old-school Metroid fare for the most part. Nothing wrong with that of course, but considering the amount of effort that clearly went into the rest of the game, I think something with a bit more "oomph" could have helped sell the "magical girl" aspect of the game a bit better!
The world is certainly big and sprawling, but many rooms and sections feel a bit copy-pasted with different enemies. It's often hard to tell what's required progression and what's optional, and I'm pretty sure a few of the required paths were hidden behind destructible blocks that would've been hard to find without shooting everything in sight. I had to scour each area multiple times just to find some bosses to fight, and I think I definitely would have appreciated a slightly smaller world and perhaps a warp system.
While the scarcity of checkpoints definitely created a lot of tension, the amount of runback after death and having to figure out how to get back to where I was (and what powerups had to be re-grabbed along the way) felt kinda cheap at times. It's almost as if the game thought I was renting it from Blockbuster and wanted to pad for time so I wouldn't be able to beat it in one session. Wanting to avoid a loss of progress, I frequently found myself watching YouTube on the side while farming health off of respawning insects in the lava rooms. On the other hand, once I found the green armor, it felt like a lot of the difficulty kinda became trivialized due to becoming immune to lava.
After much back-and-forth and combing of the various areas, I was able to beat the twin dragons(?) and the four-legged robot box thing. Based on the locked doors to the left of the initial spawn point, I figured out I must have missed at least one other boss somewhere, and at that point the thought of searching every area all over again for that one door I missed was a bit too much for me. That said, the bosses I did find were really neat, and at this point I'm open to hints because I'd love to try and finish the game!