Thanks for playing!
Yeah, the tutorial's pretty wordy, but it's kind of between that and doing more of those pop-ups (which I personally find to be annoying), so it's a tough balance to do. I think parrying could be separated into it's own tutorial stage, but I'm also unsure if new players can handle being forced to parry to continue. As for the target lock, it gets removed during death, it can be manually toggled, but I think I forgot to write it into the tutorials so it's not really clear.
Orange bar was explained in the tutorials, so I'm not sure how you missed it. As for the side text during the fight, it was something I did to avoid having to rely too much on the pop-ups, but I guess anything more than just button prompts is too complex to convey with just that. On the other hand, it's definitely too late to respond if you were to read a popup tutorial when the attack that triggers it starts, so most likely I'll just need to fit it into the first tutorial level.
I've never seen a crash happen there, so I'd appreciate if you could send me the logs for the game. By "crash completely", do you mean that the game refused to load the next level, or did the program actually close itself? Does this happen consistently, or just this once?