"While the controls were quite snappy, it sometimes felt like my shield wasn't coming up when pressing the off hand attack button." You're absolutely right about that being a problem. The way it's currently coded is if you can raise the shield, the act of pressing the button down, (as in not holding it,) raises the shield, meaning if you pressed it while you couldn't raise your shield, the shield won't raise. Fixing that and some similar issues are top of my priority list when I get back to work.
"The automatic running feels off, I had to constantly make sure to actually stop running so that I didn't drain my stamina." Think it would feel better if running was a button you held, and then doing the dodge jump was if you tried to dodge right after releasing the dodge/run button?
"How much of the graphics are placeholders?" Most of them. I have a mostly consistent color pallet for a lot of the tiles right now, which I like, but I'm not an artist. I might make the tiles less noisy in general to better fit a gameboy aesthetic. I'll have to do some research on how to deal with deuteranomaly and other types of color blindness. Not sure how long that will take though. But thanks for letting me know.