I'm a little scattered, but towards the end of the week here i've become a little bit more fired up and optimistic.

So, very large changes to some core systems for this week, with a lot of followup work needed if i continue down this path.
This week is very focused on 1 main change with a few ancillary changes to go with it.

So, walks, sprints, and dashes have been heavily adjusted across the cast. The main takeaways are that Suu is slower horizontally, and Deflect is a much more exclusive mechanic, and the Dash button should work more consistently, in that a lot of contextual effects for it have been adjusted.

Air dash and Ground Dash have had the 'back' versions removed, a back-inputted dash now results in a forward dash in the backwards direction. During the dash animation this allows for the character to attack behind them, even if locked on.

Suu's walk speed has been increased, and her Dash is now a step dash which has a Deflection window during the movement. Suu's airdash moves quicker and flies straighter with a shorter window for Deflection on it.

Hiyoko's walk speed has been increase, and her Dash is now a step dash which has a Deflection window during the movement. Hiyoko's airdash moves quicker and flies straighter with a shorter window for Deflection on it.

Momiji's Dash is a step dash with crossup on it.

Matsu's hover dashes have been sped up and shortened, and have projectile immunity instead of deflection. She can no longer deflect.

Kiku's dash is now just a sprint in fox form, with projectile immunity. (Running type dashes can be held by holding the dash button instead of forward. The enemy cpu uses sprints a little odd currently,  and will try to 'pump' it through projectiles). She can no longer deflect.

Pig Ninjas and Paper Ninjas dash is now just a sprint with projectile immunity. They can no longer deflect.

Ghost Samurai's Dash is now a step dash with a Deflection window during the movement.

Gashadokuro had their dash and deflect removed. The can no longer deflect.

Witches dash remains unchanged.

A related change to how deflection works is that it only 'parries' attacks that are coming head-on. During a deflection window, attacks from behind will result in a guarded hit instead. Additionally,  deflection no longer works against sweeps/low hitting moves, unless done from the air, where sweeps lose the low property.

Another related change is that the player character will try to automatically face enemies nearby. When enemies target the player, it tallies them up, and if the targeting is only coming from one side of the character, they will face that direction, even if not locked on to a target. This change _will_ need some more work and adjustments, but so far in playtesting it's been noticeably helpful and makes playing with no autolock on feel a ton smoother.

Final change is jump inputs now cache the directional input used with the jump. How it works currently is if you input up+right and the release, you will get a right-wards jump. However, the direction of the stick left-right at the end of jumpsquat is prioritized so the cached direction only applies if the stick is neutral at the end of jumpsquat.

I'm very open to any feedback, especially in regards to dash changes. I know Suu will feel a lot slower and kind of clunky now, especially without the sprint. This is a change that hurt to do, but after playtesting I came around on, as the slower pace may well be a better fit for the game flow and the sorts of environments that would work best. A lot of current rooms may be a bit too large for the current speed on offer.

Oh, and as a last thing, the bug was fixed for the frame data timeline where it would show the girlfriend track only when no girlfriend is present. The displays were swapped and the player was activating the girlfriend's display and vice versa.