Okay, I love this, especially from a conceptual standpoint. The idea of exorcising yokai and malicious monsters from Japanese folklore using a storied style of Japanese wrestling in a Punch-Out-esque setup is a really fun one. I love how much personality all the writing has and all the fun character designs - the BuruBuru and Tengu-Sensei are favorites of mine.
The playstyle is decently fun overall, with just a few drawbacks. It's cool to be able to push back or be pushed back by the enemy and actually see that progress in the arena itself as well as in the bar on the top. The smaller mechanical intricacies are fun to play around with like attacking right before an enemy's attack comes out to counter it or chaining smacks with special moves to really make some good progress. The sense of impact is great, as well. When you smack a fella, you really feel it.
However, like I said before, I do have some gripes. For one thing, I find you can get pushed back really far really quickly, which gets discouraging fast. I could bring an opponent close to the edge of the ring with a myriad of perfectly timed dodges and smacks, only to trip up & get hit by a few attacks, and then before I know it, half of the progress I just made is gone. Logically, the health bar feature is meant to mitigate this, but it really just lead to me getting knocked out while still close to the middle of the ring plenty of times. I also felt that the choreographing on some attacks was a little unclear. The Kappa demon's punches and that paper lamp's fucking bullshit fireballs of death are prime examples of this, in my eye. For the former, the actual pose doesn't read super clearly. For the latter, it felt like I had to wait until just a bit after the fireball was out to move out of the way without then moving right back into it; I actually resorted to countering it in order to stop it from happening all-together. Another issue I had - though this may be more on my side - is that controls didn't always feel perfectly responsive. Sometimes I could lay out several slaps in a volley, other times I could barely throw any. This happened a number of times, and while I'm not sure it was an issue that was in your control, it did feel worth mentioning.
Still, this is a lot of fun, and if you ever get the chance, I'd love to see you further the concept that this is a proof-of-concept for. There's tons of fun potential that has yet to be explored if you decide to pursue the concept further. Even if that isn't the case, I say that the First-Person-Sumo is a successful experiment! :>
P.S. I know this is like telling a volcano to cool down, but... phrasing, Term.
