Thanks for the feedback, sorry to have disappointed you.
The tutorial is skippable from the pause screen, I’ll probably have the game also just ask outright if the player wants to view it. Admittedly it needs an overhaul but I don’t think its completely unnecessary. It is not blocking anything in freeplay, the characters currently only show up there after beating them in the story mode. It’s set up so that you play them once in the main story (ends after the first boss), and then go to freeplay to go for a high score without the intro/outro.
We’ll implement a proper game over screen with the option to retry in the future instead of booting to the main menu upon losing. How the story impacts the game flow is something I’d been concerned about, and just never really got much feedback on. I don’t know if we’ll remove it entirely but I’ll definitely work on making it less intrusive (+ some kind of option to have things in freeplay from the get go).
I’ll try and get an update out within a few weeks to remedy everything (hopefully sooner, but I’m the only programmer still active)