Absolutely the best comment I've gotten so far, thank you so much!
Pretty much agree with everything you've said, you figured out how I beat her as well and probably the only way to beat her still haha.
In terms of different sides of dialogue, yeah about halfway through I realised "it'd probably be good if I added a border and placed all the UI in there" but my code was too spaghetti to do anything about it at that point sadly, thinking for version 2 I'll have it that all EM1-LY dialogue will be on the right and literally everyone else on the left in nice dedicated boxes, with of course a dialogue history viewer for catching comments you miss.
And thank you! I call it a binding of isaac clone because that was the main inspiration (along with Hades lol), glad to hear it has surpassed being mere imitation!
Tweaking and balancing is absolutely the name of the game for for 2.0, the code re-factor (and getting the game off of python and into an actual game engine by god) should make it a hell of a lot easier to tweak these things.
The art is going to get a majorrr overhaul in 2.0 as well. I'm planning out a puppet system and a more traditional view as opposed to the directly overhead thing I've got going on now.
Once again, thank you so much! Really glad to hear someone beat the game :D