Hey, thanks for playing. I'm glad you like the visuals, even though looking at your recent spritework I feel like I'm far behind you. There was actually going to be one more background layer in front of the others, but I didn't manage to finish it in time for this demo, and there's a slight perspective issue with the current layers that's bugging me which I might attempt fixing first.
I've got lots of similar feedback on the controls, and since I want to keep the combat pretty similar to what it is now, I'll probably reduce the inertia a bit more to allow for more precision, and perhaps reduce the max horizontal speed to previous demo levels. There'll definitely be tweaks to the attacks too, and perhaps a few more of them; there's already a simple autocombo implementation in the game but no attacks to combo into yet.
There's indeed a kind of simple 3D effect for some sounds, it's a built-in feature of SDL_Mixer and quite easy to use.