I really love the premise of this game. It incorporates a lot of themes brilliantly, and the story blends serious and silly quite well. I do wish the opening text didn't take so long to go through, but that's a relatively minor issue.
But...
It feels about three times longer than it needs to be, starts to really drag around the halfway point, and what might have been minor, forgivable flaws really start to become a problem. The three sections of the game vary in design and graphics, but basically play the same. The long, mazelike dungeons got repetitive. The fact that things shot at you from offscreen and you could spam fire back went from funny to tedious. Running into objects that look like they can be walked by and having way too big a hitbox for anything resembling a bullet hell turned frustrating. The fact that you don't auto heal after a boss fight, along with the difficulty ramp in the bosses, became grating.
None of these things are deal breakers, but they're all the kind of minor annoyances that are plenty tolerable on a short and sweet game but become infuriating as time goes on.
I did finish it, the storyline was engaging enough and there was a bit of sunk costs on my part, but by the end I just wanted it to be over. I did not enjoy having to slog through a village full of enemies, and the reveal at the end was soured by how tired I was by that point.
Throughout the whole thing I kept pondering whether this game felt So Bad It's Good or not. And I really don't think it does. The gameplay is conventional and although it has flaws in the details, is by and large competently executed. The graphics and sound are simple, but nice. The storyline is silly and quirky and weird, but doesn't really hit the notes of janky goodbadness that I was expecting.
I think what's most telling, though, is that I'm very much approaching this review as if it were an earnest attempt at a quality game.
Weirdly, it does a great job with the modifiers, possibly the best of any of the games I've played so far, while completely missing the boat on the core theme of the jam in my mind.