Thank you for the wonderful review!
I definitely agree with the critique here - this was my most ambitious jam project (in spite of the small scale, the amount of characters / cgs / backgrounds is far beyond what I've done before, and the watercolor style was also quite tricky to work with) so it definitely suffered slightly in terms of sprite variety as a result, and your points about the writing feeling flat at times / things being a bit unclear in the beginning are definitely something I need to work on.
Regardless, I'm very glad you enjoyed the story! This was (among other things) me trying to break down and further explore the idea of transformation / the appeal it has to me, and I'm glad those aspects were interesting to others as well (even if they are presumably more normal about the subject matter than I am).