I've worked with you guys on two game jams before and not unlike those, this was a very ambitious project. It's clear to me as well that it's easy to just slightly overscope during a jam and if, additionally, just a couple of things go wrong during development, the loss of that time can have a huge impact on the final result. The good stuff is obvious - Lusk and Rockii made some very nice portraits and tracks, no notes there. The backgrounds and presentation all have a very consistent feel, solid style. (I do wish the grid of the battlefield could be a little less opaque, it hurt my eyes a bit when I was going fast)
Enemy AI was executed very well in my opinion, you tried to communicate and anticipate every attack beforehand and their movements kept me engaged throughout.
What really sells it though.. The controls are sick. The lerping of the blade, the animation when you hit an enemy! Even though it's just represented by a circle, the feeling of spinning really really fast is realized super well here and it's obvious to me that the time spent on crafting and improving upon this basic movement was great allocation of development resources.
I wouldn't say this about a lot of the other stuff, though. And this is where your ambition dragged you down quite a bit again.
(Long inhale) SIX encounters, fodder enemies, attack patterns, cool backgrounds, a smooth Monarch ui-slop menu in true fashion, an options menu, a stylized encounter selection with portraits, pre-encounter story text, two special abilities, an interesting spin on health points, multiple music tracks, the list goes on! (gasp for air)
I think you should try to shift your focus away from quantity. I believe that at its core, in ideal form, a jam entry like this one should be more like a polished prototype than a full experience. I imagine what you could have done had you, say, limited yourself to just two or three really good battles. One that actually shows you the basics of the game, one that challenges you to learn its fighting language and one that truly tests your skill. Instead, there's six bosses that each have around 1-3 special moves, from what I've seen.
I did not feel a difficulty curve during my playthrough. It seemed like Dracula was around the same challenge as Dwayne or Baba Yaga.
And while pre-encounter text can help set the atmosphere, it lacked the depth and invested resources here to truly get me on board with what was happening and instead blended together into a vaguely themed blob of words. I even feel like using the time you spent on implementing the text and putting it into the game to instead just work out some nice, contextualizing paragraphs for the game description could have worked better. Like how old games used to do it with their manuals!
Tldr.; there's lots of great stuff here. You guys are great. It's a very fun game to play. (Which is arguably the most important part!) But for a one-week jam, don't focus on variety. Prioritize YOUR niche and make it stand out! That way, if things go wrong either IRL or for technical reasons, you can still catch back up and dont feel like you have to spread yourself thin just to have every aspect covered.