Very cinematic experience! I didn't really like such an acceleration in player movement, but it's a minor complaint. Nice game! 

Really great, I'm at a loss for words, from the art to the genal feel of the game if anything could be improved maybe adding diegetic music for the ambushes would elevate it even more,  but don't get me wrong that would be adding the cherry on top of the cream, caramel, sparkles, and sauce, it's really impressive just as it is 

The art and the atmosphere it created along with the audio is great. I love the 2 colored pants, I understand that this might just have been to make animating it easier, but pants with different colored legs are really cool.

The combat felt quite basic at first, but the high low attack system made it a bit more interesting once you got more enemies to fight. The blood heal/attack boost added a little more depth as well. The blocking felt pretty useless tho, I instantly did way better once I stopped using block at all.

Cool game!! Was challenging all the way through, and thank god for the sword blood mechanic, cause it really adds a lot to the game. Its risky to pull off, but the reward of healing and a temp boost to your attack power makes it all the more worth it!

The boss was cool too! A healthbar for it wouldve been nice, tho, but thats my only nitpick, tbh

Man, i love this game!  It kinda feels like the NES version of Nioh. I don't know if you have ever played the original Ninja Gaiden Triology on NES but this game also reminds me of Ninja Gaiden especially in terms of gameplay. Like the enemies pop out of nowhere all of a sudden :) The boss fight is so Ninja Gaiden like. Btw you need to add a boss music and a health bar for the boss fight.

The art of the game is very good. I love the character, enemy and boss designs. The flame throwing lantern enemies were annoying but i like that every enemy has a week point. Oh man the kabuto crab samurai boss fight, i totally dig it's design. You even made a second phase for the boss i guess. After you damage it for a certain times, it starts a second attack, spraying water or something like that.

Gameplay mechanics. The high attack, low attack mechanic is a good touch, it adds some depth to combat. You need to do the right attack according to enemy's stance. I tried to the same thing in my game but  i think your implementation is much better. In the  current state of the game blocking is not very useful. I beat the whole game without blocking even once but i'm guessing that you will want to improve the combat mechanics further in the future so that it'll become more vital. Dropping the lantern into tall grass is a very nice touch. The fire spreads through the grass and burns down enemies. Cool delivery of enviromental weapon. I think it should give more damage to the enemies though and we don't get damage  when we walk in the burning grass, there should be a risk/reward aspect to it.  I think health replenishment should be handled in a different way, it makes the game a little easy. You can something like power ups. Checkpoints are good too but some people may like more challenge. You may conside placing less frequent checkpoints maybe in the final version of the game.

That's all i have to say right now. I'm gonna follow your itch.io account bcs i really like your style. Your team did a great job and i wish you make successful games in the future. Best of luck to you!

The environment and levels are gorgeous. I very much enjoyed the cinematic effects. The gameplay, and specifically the character controls, were a bit confusing to me and I had a few issues with the physics. I felt like I didn't have enough control of the character and the anticipation phase of enemies' attacks were a bit sudden. Despite of that, I think with a few numeric adjustments and some extra visual feedback, those issues would definitely go away.

One thing that was really nice was the indication from enemies as to where to defend and how to attack. I died lots of times at the beginning but when it finally clicked, it made a lot of sense and I started having a lot of fun. Also, the environmental attacks with the fire and all were a great touch.

This game is full of very interesting details. The butterflies, the blood mechanics, the crustacean boss, the ending, the pretty environment. I feel like this has lots of potential, good job!

Pretty moody, and nicely progressive ^^

What about adding some bounce back to player and ennemies on parrying? Or stun? It would introduce some risk/reward/impact ? 

Impressive for a jam project.

Lots of great little details here, neat art style. The grass slowing you down but being able to be slice it down was fun and then using it for an elemental attack  was super cool! It felt like there was a bit of slow down which took me out of it a bit and maybe an  extra checkpoint would have been nice to remedy some of the frustration from my fingers being confused but it was fun overall and really hits the Samurai brief. Also extra points for the butterfly!

Really awesome! The visuals were fantastic! I felt like the cleaning your blade was a really cool detail I would love to see way more, the samurai armies following you made me feel like I was in one of those japanese movies! great stuff! 

Fantastic game! the mechanics feel nice, the combat is pretty interesting, I was having a bit of hard time with defending and attacking my fingers would get confused, so many times i was attacking or defending wrong, maybe using the arrow keys for the attacks and defense and awsd for exclusive movement might be a good solution, but it was enjoyable all over, great art too! 

Visually, this is pretty good. I liked the overall aesthetics and the evil red crustacean samurais are cute. Gameplay wise, its kinda fun matching the right stance to beat the enemies and using space to heal is an interesting moveset that takes control of your gameplay slash mechanic and turn it into a sort of strategy type of move. 

However, the skill curve just isn't really in the cards for me. Playing this has made me realize that enemies comes in droves, sometimes I couldn't hit them right and the space to heal doesn't work somehow? The lantern enemies are egregious for spamming that beam thing that keeps sapping health so I wasn't able to parry that. They have a big health pool so its also kinda difficult for me to figure out how to beat them down. I'm not good at hack and slash games/beat em ups and I wasn't a huge fan of it to begin with so this just isn't really down for me to really enjoy as much.

Also lack of BGM and SFX is noticeable in areas, and audio mixing can be a bit loud and unstable with the slash.

That being said, the potential is there. As one of the commenters mentioned, improving the bells and whistles would net you a lot in terms of potential viability.