The Phantom Menace makes me think of Star Wars Episode I. Which came out over 20 years ago. Now I feel old.
The concept of being able to transform with different attacks effective against different enemies is a solid one. I'm not sure having melee and ranged forms is necessary; it might be better to just have normal and phantom form effective against different enemies.
I do like that the story is presented in game and the writing is fairly competent.
With the disclaimer that I'm at best ambivalent toward pixel art out of the way, I think there are some good pieces here but a few issues with the presentation that really hurt the aesthetic. The biggest is that scaling isn't consistent, so some graphics have huge pixels (like the UI, which is horrendously stretched) and others have much smaller pixels (such as Sakura herself). There are also some visual artifacts (Sakura appears to have a border or fringe) and possible compression issues (avoid DXT1/DXT5 like the plague for pixel art, BC7 is better but still can butcher things). Even if the assets themselves don't change at all, fixing these issues would make the game look dramatically better.
I don't know if I was missing something or just suck at this kind of game, but I found it ridiculously difficult and didn't make it past the third enemy. I'd expected these enemies to be mooks that would die quickly, but they took tons of hits to kill and I'd lose a big chunk of health in the process. I found combat to be clunky in general, and the seeming lack of effectiveness of my attacks didn't help.
The main menu music is super nice though.