Spoiler
Options contribute a lot of your total damage and dying drops power by a full level (hello UFO). One of the passive items enhances your base shot so it feels on about the level of earlier games, and some items grant helper options that stick around permanently. I guess the idea is that you use the item helpers as insurance against chain deaths.
Scoring is inane. There's no grazing, no cancel PIV (easily missed opportunity, just make the bullets turn into money) and the spell card bonuses don't scale. Money items are point items, and the current money in hand affects the item value. You can print money by hitting bullets with the mallet; C items recharge on a timer, but one of the passive items gives you cooldown reduction. Hence you stall out every pattern waiting for the hammer to recharge so you can cancel the densest point, repeat through the whole game while spending/losing as little as possible, and there's your score.
The Sakuya shottype is similar to PCB Sakuya-B with smoother tilting and adjustable spread width via vertical movement. I find it really fucking irritating to control: the waggling speed decays the closer it gets to neutral, and any unplanned unfocused movement leads to it drifting about organically on both axes.
Danmaku isn't very interesting. Nonspells are kinda obnoxious and probably harder than any of the spells shown so far. The music is about as generic as it gets, although the stage 3 track's opening melody sounds rather familiar. The character art's okay. The vibe/personality isn't coming through much at all to me, but it's not like it's the first time that's happened in a demo. I think I find this one more tolerable than the last two-and-a-half games (excluding The Game That Shall Not Be Named), which isn't exactly praise. The best I can say is that this could be DDC 2, since that's a game I quite like in spite of/due to its complete brokenness.