Zanac Hitting Switch (in Japan)

[ATTRACTS]

Honestly, I didn't think it's so bad. It's slow but not awful. That said, you definitely gotta keep in mind it's a port of the old phone version. I went in knowing that and expected it to feel like a phone game from 2005, and you know what? It's pretty good.

That’s great but when you slow Zanac down to a crawl with imprecise lag, it’s not Zanac anymore. The whole point and excitement of Zanac is the manic nature of the gameplay.

[trap15]

Which isn't something you could do on a phone in 2005. It's neat to explore takes on ideas based on what can and cannot be done. If you want regular Zanac, you can play regular Zanac.

EDIT: Having now played it...

If you're only talking about the new arrange version I could see where you're coming from. There is definitely some weird varying input lag that makes it pretty uncomfortable. The smoother movement I think almost makes it worse, personally, as my brain wants it to behave more fluidly than it really does. The original version however plays pretty much exactly how I'd hoped: an interesting twist on Zanac on a tiny display, with all the trademark quirks of J2ME phone games. Definitely don't regret picking it up, but probably not ever going to touch the arrange mode.

[BrianC]

I like it so far. I like how the weapons were rebalanced. 1,3,4,5, and 7 no longer run out, 2 lasts a shorter time, and 6 now has a cool off timer. Definitely an interesting remix of the game.

[steveovig]

I just bought this and I really don't like it. I don't have a ton of Zanac series experience but this feels easy and slow. I was expecting something much harder. At least, it has online leaderboards, I guess, which I wasn't expecting.

[MachineAres 1CC]

Just played this for a while, and really don't like this. Original mode is just a little better than Arrange, but the performance is so awful, and the complete lack of sound effects is way more jarring than I imagined it could be. The poor performance overall just makes this version not very worthwhile. Even thinking of if this would've been novel or convenient to play back on a cell phone in the mid-2000s, I have a hard time feeling it would've been very compelling, even back then.

I am pretty surprised it launched simultaneously on the Western eShop as well, but...eh.