Thanks for playing!
The cutscenes were made entirely with Godot’s animation player. It’s a powerful feature of the engine, albeit somewhat finicky to use as scenes become more complex. The source code is freely available if you’re curious and want to inspect the project.
The MC’s design is much simpler compared to the other characters because it was one of the first assets I made, back when I was stricter about emulating NES color limits. By the time I improved the game’s art style, she already had too many sprites for me to want to bother retouching them all.