BareKnuckleRoo wrote:
Just picked it up. It's a good first effort with some interesting ideas in there.
The button remapping is greatly appreciated and well executed. I was never a fan of Touhou default with shot on middle finger and slow on the shift key. I much prefer C shot, X focus, and Z melee, and not having to setup an AutoHotKey script for it is appreciated.
The shot types are a bit iffy to start. The wide shot character literally starts with no wideshots. I mean, you'd assume they won't miss the tome drop that ups bullet count, but it's possible to do so. My first playthrough was with the straight shot type and even then, it felt pretty wimpy even towards the end of the game (got most tomes except one bullet count one I think).
Music and graphics are pretty good! The option to have 8 bit or modern soundtrack is a nice bonus, only weak areas I felt in presentation were the stage 3 music, and the player sprites, which are so small that there's not much detail there. Coupled with the fact that the characters never talk and act like silent protagonists, they're rather forgettable.
The lack of boss health bars and lack of damage indicator preceding the next phases means there's not much feedback to the player on how much damage you're doing. This is a problem because it's not clear if the melee attack is worthwhile to use as an attack or as bullet cancelling. The melee attack seems to be weak enough that it's the latter, but then the bullet cancel radius is extremely small and doesn't have any horizontal or real coverage. Having to collect items to use such a wimpy melee attack isn't the greatest. If it recharged similar to Gunbird 2's melee, or was ready to go on a timer like a Giga Wing sort of thing, you'd be able to experiment with it more instead of feeling like generally the best option is to save it for bullet cancels against the boss. In which case traditional bombs are more visually entertaining, and a player who's struggling with That One Super Hard Pattern They Hate or something won't feel they have to deplete all their melee charges there and then just soak hits the rest of the fight.
The collection radius sucks; it's way too small and your hitbox has to literally touch the item to grab it, which is a problem if an item decides to spawn on a bullet moving downward at the same speed. Usually shmups make the item collection aura at least the size of the player sprite, if not slightly bigger.
Having to collect tomes from specific enemies isn't great, because there's no special indication which enemies have a tome and which don't. A bit of memorization involved if you don't want to miss them I guess? The beehives in s2 are unique enough that it's easy to see what needs to be done there though, so that's good.
Stage 3 boss has a typo in the word "acquired".
Stage 4 boss has a typo in the word "paid", typo in the word Fabergé (missing accented é).
Stage 5: the boss's horizontal line attack is MUCH harder than anything else it uses by a significant margin due to a relatively small gap and the fact that the bullets in the line are moving as they pass by, also harder than all the final boss's attacks aside from its final one.
Stage 6: the enemies felt SUPER damage spongey. Not sure if it's intended because you're supposed to burn your melee uses on them, or if missing the bullet count card on the previous level really affected my damage, but it felt like they took a long time to kill and I let a ton of enemies go off screen due to not being able to outgun them all.
The final boss attack where it jumps around the screen (possible reference to Chen/Ran from Perfect Cherry Blossom) is way too easy, like stage 1 or 2 material due to how little there is on screen.
1CC'd it on my first try. I got a bad ending, not sure what the trigger for the good one is yet. Is there a harder mode available or do you recommend aiming for like a no damage run or something instead? I see the challenge mode menu, that's something I'll have to play with too.
Thanks for all the feedback! Yeah you definitely want to get as many tomes as you can. It has a major effect on gameplay. Looking back I could have placed them better, especially in level 5. I did try a lot of unique features to keep the game centered around bullet dodging instead of collecting items, and I can see how I kinda went overboard. Stage 6 was too spongy with its enemies I agree. You aren't meant to kill all of them but I can see how players might want to. I don't know why I didn't add item homing. I guess I wanted to add some challenge to it or make it feel more retro.
I'm thinking of adding some updates including the typo fixes. Might also add item homing since that's a fairly common complaint. Will add sound indicators so the player knows when an enemy with a tome is spawned. Will also make some enemies have less HP.
If you are having trouble getting the tomes and/or the good ending, I have a walkthrough available on the Steam community page. Let me know if you manage to beat hard mode and the challenge levels!
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