I played your game very quickly right now. I played through King Candy's level as my character and then halfway through Cure Lovely's level as Cure Grace (Nodoka). I will need to play through it with more time this weekend. So far I like what I see! First, I really liked how my character was translated to the game - to be honest I like it more here than in my own game, so props to the animator haha. Also: for a game with so many characters, this Mega Man style progression is a good idea, you can have a small level for each character and still have a lot of content. Are the 9 levels you face randomly selected? They seemed to be the same in my 2 playthroughs, but I may have misremembered. Is there going to be a level and boss for each character or are the "enemy" characters well defined?
I think there's no problem with clones, as long as it's not required to beat the game with all characters to unlock stuff - in that case it can become tedious having to play over and over again with the same moveset. But so far it seems that it's not the case!
Reading about your game having over 200 characters is one thing, scrolling through 11 (?) pages of playable characters is another haha. I am looking forward to checking out the rest of the game, there seems to be a lot of content! I'm not used to fangames having this much content!
Itch.io can be kind of aggressive towards fangames, these are people trying to launch their own IPs and may dislike the competition from work based on preexisting content. I used to frequent smaller forums (that may have already closed down) which received these types of games more positively. Don't worry about it!