Thank you for the thoughtful comments! For the cloud effect I followed some of the steps from this twitter thread by Alex Strook, specifically the cloud mesh was made manually kind of like how it's shown here, with lighting baked in blender into the vertex normals to be used by the shader. Then I wrote a shader in Shader Graph for displacement and color noise over time. It's missing a lot of the advanced features shown in that thread, some that aren't supported by the graphics pipeline I'm using in Unity and some I just don't need since you won't be running into the clouds.
Definitely agree that the slicing movement makes it too difficult to control. I had wanted to make the attack more like the hook where you don't have to be precise but I didn't have time. Same goes for taking damage, oh well! Thanks for playing!