Hold my fucking tea, there is a piano in this game. That's a first for you I think? Oh and 3d. Pretty wacky if you ask me. Alright wall of text time.
So I was not expecting to have tears in my eyes during this jam, but here we are. I think I know where this story comes from, and it hits very close to home. Especially when that story is told by someone I've stuck around for a very long time. Fragment jam was more than 4 years ago you know. Having struggled my way through quite a few artforms at this point, I still feel terrible at all of them. To me the idea of battlescars as signs of strength is really encouraging, and I'll try to get that into my own head.
On a completely different note, designwise: the exchange mechanic is currently close to meaningless. I sometimes just bashed my way through the melee attacks just to get to fire off three of those guaranteed hit magical missiles. Tormentor X punisher did an interesting thing; to use your gooder weapon (pew pew pew) you have to get a kill with the shotgut (kaboom, shitty range) so you were constantly switching between the weapons. Maybe something along the lines of that could have been slipped in, to make the gameplay more intentional. Honestly button mashing was the best method to deal damage, which wasn't that massively fun.
Dodging attacks though? Hella fun. The attacks are paced just right so you have time to slip out of their reach before they get you. Overall this is kind of a slow moving game (as slow as these kinda games get), and I liked how the slower pace got me out of jumping around like a lizard to actually observing and using my frontal lobe to get out of the way of the attacks. From my perspective, this game (like most of yours) is ultimately about dodging, and the dodging was really fun.
The game has a bit of first time jank. Fullscreening the game doesn't scale it up so you have to zoom in to get it right, animations are a bit clunky, colors are a bit all over the place. Considering you wrote the bones thing for animation, and just figured out how to 3d in general, I think this is fantastic. The camera switch when you finally get a boss? Made me smile like an idiot. I don't know if you are planning on doing more 3d things, but it's definitely an interesting direction, and I'm intrigued by what you will cook up with that.
Also pico8 fonts for the win.
Awesome work!