Okay, so, I kinda really wanted to love this game, but sadly I can't all that much...
Like, I can FEEL all the love and passion that was put into this, I really can, but there are a lot of tiny things that kinda add up and makes things less enjoyable sadly.
I still had a fun time with it tho, even if pretty short. The TV Npcs are actually really charming and funni to have around, And I also really like Elina as a character, both design and personality wise (Altought honestly, cute anime witch is definitelly my weak point, I am just fully unable to not love any character of that kind)
all the character designs in general are extremelly cool honestly, I really love how this hoster looks, specially on the dialogue portraits, but the actual sprites aren't anything bad either, even thought a few enemy animations look very iffy I must admit.
I'm really sad that the main character isn't an original asset tho. Like, I wouldn't mind if it at least looked like the character I'm playing as, but man, that's clearly not Lumina lol (I would probably not even realize it was an external asset if it wasn't by you guys showing Lumina's design actually, I only know it is borrowed from somewhere else because other people pointed it out)
The music is also really good, and I really appreciate the addition of a music player lmao, as unecessary as that might sound xD
I would actually love having that main theme (Ethereal Frequencies) posted somewhere like youtube or such, it's really that good. Only complaint I have here is that the music in-game doesn't have a smooth loop, it kinda just stops awkwardly before restarting, but oh well, not the end of the world.
Now to some actual nitpicks tho, the level design is really rought as it is right now. There's just a lot of big rooms that feels pretty empty and with huge blind jumps with spikes on the bottom. Try making every room to have at least a little bit of "regular platformer game level design" instead of making "big open explorable squares", if you even understand what I mean that is, I really don't know how to explain it properly.
Combat also feels very aimless as of now, since it's just spamming attack button inside the enemies and they die, witouth real knockback or any kind of impact at all on hit, and the enemies's attack animations also feel very weird for having no real windup or telegraph before coming, and also have no impact on hit (IF I got hit by someone at all that is, I genuinelly don't know since combat REALLY lacks feedback and polish)
The first boss also felt really weird as, he didn't really attack me at all? I'm not sure if he even has any attack already programmed but on my fight he just wobbled back and forth and let me just slice him up for free.
Also more of a weird thing to complain about, but the first dialogue between Lumina and Elina feels very awkward lol. Like, it really lacks some naturality I think, I don't really know how to explain. Perhaps having more portraits to better convey different expressions for the characters would have been nice, but considering how high quality those are I assume you just wouldn't have had the time to do it unfortunatelly. At least Elina got very likeable afterwards tho, at least for me, but I'm probably biased xD (Lumina not so much tbh, she felt kinda awkward during the entire game, altought that might also be side effect of both not having multiple portraits and also not having an actual in-game sprite, so she really felt like she wasn't really part of the world you know.)
And I guess that's it, sorry for the essay lol. I'm definitelly keeping an eye on this if you go for smvm tho, I Need more of Elina. I also recorded my playthrought altought I don't think anything interesting happened on it, but if you wanna see it anyway then just hit me up.