Last night after TGS I went to Club Sega to check out the Caladrius AC location test before I had to catch my night bus. It wasn't so crowded so I was able to spend about an hour and a half with it before I had to catch the bus. I 1cc it in that time so I got to see most of the changes that had been made to Original mode, and made it about halfway through Arcade mode before I had to throw the credit and leave. Forgive the quality of my pics, they were taken on my phone.
Original mode is basically an arranged version of the 360 story mode, while Arcade mode features extra mission stages. Most things in original work the same way as they do in the 360 version, but there is one major change. In the 360 game when you get hit you undergo a shame break that ups your damage slightly for the remainder of the game. In AC you not only get the boost, but the patterns become a little bit easier too. It makes the game much easier to 1cc overall. Normally I think dynamic difficulty is good, but Caladrius already had that covered with the damage boost, so I wasn't a big fan of this change. It only took me two tries to 1cc it after having not played in months. However I consider myself to be pretty good at Caladrius so I don't know if I'd go so far as to call AC an easy 1cc. As mentioned in the main thread the bits in stage 6 are indeed now killable, but it only makes things slightly easier since they instantly respawn and snipe the moment they spawn. I'm guessing it will still give a lot of players a hard time.
All 6 characters are available from the start with full customization.
The other changes are primarily cosmetic. The sexuality has been majorly toned down, with new art for the cut-ins that shows far less skin. Lilith's artwork has been heavily changed so that her black flames look more like a dress. Heres some examples of the new final pattern cut ins:
The other major visual change is that the no-miss artwork is totally different (for obvious reasons to anyone who played the 360 version). I actually really like the new artwork. I was able to get the no miss art for the first 4 stages during the time I played:
Unfortunately I didn't get to spend much time with Arcade mode since I had to catch the bus. Basically you play through the first two stages of the normal game and then stage 3 is a special mission stage where you fight waves of enemies that increase in difficulty. After that you proceed onto the standard stage 3 and I assume there are more mission stages as you progress. The scoring and multiplier is different in Arcade mode though I'm not sure the exact details. Your multiplier maxes out at 10.0 and I was riding on the 10.0 multiplier throughout most of my playtime. The result of this is that the game is much easier; I had 9 bombs and had maxed out 2 of my elemental weapons by the end of the mission stage.
All in all I was pretty satisfied with the location test. Not sure what I think of the difficulty changes, but I was also playing my usual custom Caladrius. Considering that when I was trying to play the 360 version as default Lilith the game was about 50 times harder the difficulty changes might make a good incentive to experiment and learn new characters. Really looking forward to my local arcade getting this.
