Just played it through in one big play session this morning. I really enjoyed the art and was surprised at just how much dialogue there was and it never felt boring. I mostly focused on talking to Raven but would often talk to the others along the way just to hear more.
For a good while in the beginning I was grinding in the magma area since I couldn't find anything to do in the forrest. After dying a lot and feeling like there must be something I'm missing, I talked to the parrot and learned about the order of the 4 areas and the bosses. The forrest temple had me confused because I went there multiple times and didn't realize that the tiles on either side of the statue were an entrance.
After getting the upgrade I felt like I had a chance at going through the whole game. I played the patched ROM so I don't know if things were different before, but I felt like grinding didn't bring me much benefit. The only thing that really made a difference was getting the power ups.
The only thing I found majorly frustrating was how enemies can still deal damage even as they are blowing up (and still moving around) post death. This even happened to me on the final boss where I won, got the victory text box, then died from the boss's explosion moving into me.
The amount of content for such a short dev time is crazy, it's clear you put a lot of work into this so kudos! I had quite a fun time playing :)