First off, apologies for leaving this one so long.
In general, I enjoyed the gameplay here. The transform mechanic is neat and combat in both normal and transformed forms is satisfying and fun.
There were a few things about the gameplay that I'm not quite sure about. I wouldn't call them flaws necessarily, or even things I didn't like, but more things I was a bit confused about.
Requiring a full soul bar to transform is an interesting tradeoff, but I don't think it really worked out. I only transformed if I felt I really needed to, because I was worried I'd run into a boss or something without a full soul bar and get pasted. Transforming also takes a really long time.
I quickly ended up with more potions around than I could hold. Having to juggle half-full potions and weigh what you want to keep and what you want to ditch could be interesting, but with the current length and balancing felt pretty pointless.
The enemy AI is extremely predictable and exploitable. You can kind of bait enemies out and then stunlock them with arrows. The game does seem to balanced with this in mind, though.
Magissa moves really slow. Fortunately the maps aren't so big as to make this irritating, but it does make dodging quite difficult at times. This might have been deliberate, though.
It's undeniably retro but I'm not sure what it's going for exactly. The title screen mixes crisp text with a low-fi logo, and the only system I know of that can run a split resolution like this is the Amiga. Tracker music, too, is very Amiga-esque. The colour palette and style of the tileset is strongly reminiscent of SNES games while the character sprites are more NES or Game Boy. It also has a very MS DOS exit prompt. On the whole, though, it works well enough, and I'm just a retro nerd nitpicking at this point.
In particular, I really liked the music. I could sit at that title screen all day. The graphics were good but they didn't really stand out to me, it's a decent retro-style sprite game but there are a zillion of those out there.
I think the length of this game is about right for a game jam demo. If it were longer I'd start complaining about saves and pause menus and more breaks in the action, but as it stands it's not a problem and the game flows well.
I'd like to see more story and more background information in particular, but that's probably out of scope and not in line with what this game was going for. I just like games with a lot of story.
In that vein there are definitely places I kinda wished this game was more ambitious in, but you can only make so much, and it does a good job of being a retro-style action game.