That’s a cool concept, reminds me a bit of pokken but with freer phase shift. If you expand it it can be quite cool!
At the moment I would say it’s “commital” to switch, but not in a way that feels planned since it just activates the move under that button, which is a long backflip. In practice, the best way to target lock is by pianoing [D]C]D[ in quick succession to buffer it out of the block in a very safe way, which makes it both somewhat less accessible while being quick and safe to do once you figured out the trick. I would recommend binding it to an extra button, and just using some quick visual feedback if you want to keep it non-comittal.
It’s a bit hard to judge the gameplay at the moment, because I don’t feel there’s a strong reason to be in one more or another. There’s not that many attacks that make you want to go in one mode or the other (tracking, anti air, slow or linear…), so I think with more moves it will be easier to catch the idea.
Also unfortunately, there’s a technical issue with the character select screen requiring two players, but not really selecting properly, and while relaunching the game to check what I was saying I couldn’t start a match as it bound my pad and kb to the same slot, and didn’t bind kb player 2 to the other slot, so I can’t check the moves again to make sure I’m not saying wrong stuff lol