That laser attack on the second bird boss is rough, I'm quitting there. I watched the ending in Celio's uploaded playthrough.
Of all the games I played so far, this one definitely feels the most like a journey. The narrative isn't super inventive, but it serves its purpose well.
Visuals were serviceable, I have some small peeves with them though. The high res font felt out of place in the pixel aesthetic, and it's not like it helps readability, as it's pretty stylized as is. Most of the game's screens looked pretty simple, which is fine in a jam context. The only place where I think some more detail would've been necessary is the water area, the bright cyan just doesn't look very good in my opinion and there definitely could've been done more to make the visuals match the vibe which the music was giving. In the mountain area, I found some of the screens in the mountain region hard to parse visually, as I was never sure whether certain tiles would be treated like walls or death pits when dashing into them. I didn't actually get there in my own playthrough, but the final arena and its boss had a very interesting energy to them, sort of reminded me of Giygas from Earthbound.
Music was excellent for the entirety of the game, it did a great job of establishing a mood. (And it just sounded good :)) Sound design was simple and didn't get in the way of anything.
I have some gripes with the gameplay. The sword didn't feel very good to use in my opinion. I think one of the main reasons for that is that the hitbox was just really tiny. You have to get very close to enemies to deal any damage, and when either you or the enemy move a tiny little bit, you are going to take damage. This is made worse by that three hit combo that makes you move towards where you're facing. I don't think this is bad on its own, as the enemies do get knocked back to compensate, but it did become an issue when trying to repeatedly attack a static enemy (such as any enemy in a corner or the bird boss), because you will just move into it and take damage. It becomes more apparent just how bad the sword is when you obtain the disc, because why would you use anything but the high-velocity homing projectile that bounces from enemy to enemy? The sword (fortunately) becomes obsolete by that point.
A big pain point for me was that you could fall down into pits or water when dashing. This just did not feel great, especially when sometimes the player was clearly still visually standing on the ground, and I think the game could've been better off if this just was not possible in the first place. I know some of the platforming sections rely on the player being able to fall, but I'm sure there is a way to design around this. If this is really something you want to keep, it might be advisable to make the player respawn next to the pit they fell into instead of the beginning of the room.
The map is pretty large, and while traversal through the forest and the earlier parts of the mountain do get trivialized by the dash, I think that fast travel in some shape would have been adequate. When I was stuck at the second bird boss, I wanted to go back to buy some more upgrades, but the way there is so long that I just could not be bothered.
It took me a while to figure out that those black obstacles with red numbers on them require you to kill all enemies in the room. Might want to indicate that more clearly somehow. Or maybe I'm just stupid, who knows. In one of the rooms where you're required to do this, an enemy flew offscreen, making it impossible to kill. Not a huge deal because I could just re-enter the room, but figured it'd be worth noting.
Some other miscellaneous notes:
The text scrolling in the dialog boxes seems to happen within the same predetermined duration, no matter how long the text is, so very short dialog texts would take a while to fully reveal, whereas long lines would go by very quickly. Generally, you want to reveal each individual character within a set amount of time, not a percentage of the whole text.
I wish the music and sfx volume settings were sliders, or at least had numbers indicating their current value next to them.
That's about it! This game was pretty neat, it felt like it was inspired by aLttP, and it does manage to capture some of that energy!