Couple of early thoughts/impressions:
- Shot and focus are pretty standard; most defeated enemies drop energy, tap the "special" button when the meter is half full or higher for a defensive area bomb, hold it when completely full for "hyper" mode, for a few seconds of higher-powered shots and score item drops from targets (and Cave-style "cancel the bullet pattern into shinies" awards for finishing bosses with it). Getting hit cancels the mode but won't kill you.
- At the end of each area you choose one of three awards: an extra life, a permanent shot upgrade, or unlocking/powering-up a fourth-button special ability that usually resembles some manner of "invincibility dash" move and is governed by its own regenerating meter. No "traditional" power-ups during gameplay. In "Story" mode you play stages one at a time, and can replay levels to complete "challenges" to earn one more power-up at the end; each character's progress is saved separately. "Arcade" is a more traditional all-stages run.
- Three characters to select, with different shot types, movement speeds, fourth-button abilities, and story dialogue. Speaking of which, I don't know Finnish mythology at all, but the setting and dialogue seem to have an appropriate level of fairy tale-ness about them off the cuff (and the latter can be skipped or turned off). I can only guess that some...liberties were taken with those character designs, though.
- Third-party 360 controller works fine, d-pad included. Sound levels and key/button mappings can be adjusted, as can a couple of graphical settings; in windowed mode my laptop did pretty well framerate-wise.
- Presentation most closely resembles Touhou, and is generally fine in that regard, though I'd presumably need to know more about the game's inspiration to spot the uniquely Finnish stuff therein. I did have some bullet visibility issues; the background brightness adjuster helps somewhat, though some of the smaller hazards in particular are easy to lose in the muddle no matter what. I'd also suggest borrowing Touhou's boss position indicator, since the bosses I've seen are relatively small targets and regularly obscured by their patterns.
- More than that I found several enemy attacks hard to react to unless you know they're coming (the second boss's "rising water" thing comes most quickly to mind); more warning signs of some sort are definitely warranted IMO. I also sometimes felt that grabbing point items in particular could feel kinda niggly; I'd sometimes miss one when I could swear I'd gotten close enough to grab it.
-One last, minor niggle is the apparent inability to enter fewer than three initials on the score entry screen; I have to tack some other random letter onto the end of "BM", and feel
shamefully uncivilized whilst doing so.
