I say that affectionately; I genuinely dig the vibe and what it's going for, and I'm no stranger to NES style difficulty, but there are some elements of the way that some things interact with each other that doesn't quite work.

- If L1 is the button to dash, it at the very least needs to be a constant 'on' state as long as it's being pressed that affects every time I press Left or Right. I don't know if the simultaneous button press of [L1 + Direction] is its own IF statement rather than L1 being its own boolean for use in the state machine, but it feels really inconsistent and janky in the moment to have to keep pressing it again to dash when you're aleady holding it. Gravity Circuit is a better look at how this mechanic should feel, I think. For that matter, I'd love an actual toggle, since I love to move fast in these kinds of games.

- You can either have Toward be the button for parrying projectiles, or you can have double-tap direction as the dash. Having both active at once means that in the flow of things you're constantly at risk of doing a dash attack into the enemy instead of riposting their projectile, which feels very bad in the moment while you're rapidly parrying multiple projectiles. At the bare minimum a menu option to turn off the double tap dash input would be nice.

- The delay bounce before a down stab feels really flighty and hard to control; I'd recommend either losing the delay entirely or locking the player object's X coordinates at the moment of attack press, or... something like that, I'm just kinda spitballing here. Also it feels like you should get way more up-bounce on successfully hitting the down stab on an enemy; you can barely clear some of the intended bounce bridges.

- Flying enemies can end up getting soft-stuck on ledges? I've been standing on a platform and a flying enemy will just fire projectiles into the side of the thing I'm standing on, which they should absolutely be pathing around to shoot at me if I'm reachable.

- For that matter enemy AI tends to feel a bit inconsistent? I really want them to do the same thing when I come at them the same way, but it seems like it's kind of a crapshoot each time. If this is a style thing, then so be it, just thought I'd mention it.

- Oh, and the jump off a wall feels kind of anemic? It almost feels like it's not its own bespoke state. It's not a big problem or anything, it's just, if you're playing a ninja game, you really want that XSpeed to have a little more bounce off the kick, you know? At least for a short distance; it makes jumping up those tight tunnels way more fun. Not a priority obviously, but would be a big improvement just on pure enjoyment.

Overall a game I'd say is like 90% of the way to being truly great, just maybe a couple of drafts away in my opinion.