Thanks for playing!
I've been honestly surprised by how well the narrative has been received, and the diary section in particular. I was very worried that the story would fall flat or come off as overly narmy, and I was concerned that the diary would kill the pacing of the game.
The tone and manner of speaking isn't really out of line with my own experiences. I guess I associate with extremely acerbic individuals. Note though that this is somewhat determined by player choices, directly and indirectly.
A lot of the shortcomings you describe touch on things that were meant to be, but were cut for time.
I originally wanted to have a boss battle at the end, but I had to cut it for scope reasons. I really didn't want to do this, but there was just no way I could squeeze it in within the time I had left. I hadn't even started planning it and was still on the "okay, how do I make this interesting" stage. I had some ideas I felt were maybe good, but it was already I think the third week and I had a pretty long list of other stuff to get done.
There are also a few ending variations that didn't make it. You would have had a few more options in the good ending, and depending on your positivity (basically karma) may have been able to force a certain outcome regardless of Sakura's choice (keeping this intentionally vague to avoid spoilers).
In short the ending really was rushed and all of the possible gameplay in it was left by the wayside.
I realized about three quarters of the way through the jam that there was really a dearth of combat sequences and that the combat sequences that did exist were pretty uninspired. By this point the levels were built, the story was locked down, and there was little I could do about it. I wasn't happy with this, but decided to just accept that this one will be a little lame and try to do better with Takagi. It didn't cross my mind to just remove it entirely, but thinking about how the game is put together I don't think it would have been practical at that point since most the sequences were already built.
Elaborating on that I'd kind of written myself into a corner with the setting in terms of having interesting enemies. The Shades (purple ghost guys) were meant to be the main enemies but I don't find them interesting at all. I wanted human enemies, but who they can be, how powerful they can be, how many I can have, and where I can put them is pretty heavily constrained by the mostly down-to-earth setting. For instance, if I'd made the handful of skinheads into a swarm, that would raise questions like "where did these guys come from" and "why don't our protagonists get arrested for 60 counts of murder".
Takagi has a way around it, and if Suckerpunch 3 (Big Team Heavies) ever comes to pass that won't really be an issue.
The shooting into the forest section was one of those ideas that you think is interesting when you come up with it but just didn't work out in practice. During playtesting I found it tedious enough that there's a specific console command to skip it, and most of the other folks who tried it just didn't get it. I think it could have been made interesting or replaced with something more interesting, but (are you seeing the pattern here?) it was too late at that point.
The magic key is in the README and help, unless I botched the default control map which is possible. There is no melee key. I had planned to do either a kick (yup, like Duke Nukem 3D) or a weapon bash (like Halo or any modern shooter), but- surprise!- didn't have time to do it. Unfortunately I left some confusing references to that in the game.
Despite all the stuff that didn't make it in, I'm pretty happy with the stuff that did and the overall result. While it still has shortcomings, it's an improvement over its predecessor in almost every area in the way a sequel should be. Story-wise, this game is really critical for setting up the rest of the series, and I was able to get all the important plot points in. I would definitely agree that the biggest shortcomings are the abrupt ending and sparse, uninspired combat.
As for the art, yeah, I know. I'm under no illusions of it being amazing; it ranges from utterly terrible to so bad it's good at best. Thing is, I am completely hopeless when it comes to bringing people onboard on my projects, and I gave up on the notion of actually having an artist a long time ago. I do have some options available to me, but I like drawing weird janky programmer art. With all that being said, while Takagi and Shattered 2 will retain this art style, I'm looking into doing something different for some other games next year.