First clear. I must say that I am a bit disappointed with the full game especially since the demo seemed so promising. This game was rushed and it most definitely shows. The game is very unbalanced, has many uninspired patterns and has numerous issues with it. Before release, ZUN released a demo update that changed the chapter bonuses in Legacy mode to life pieces instead of bomb pieces. This changed the game drastically since you could get maximum lives at the stage 3 boss now. ZUN said at the time that he would fix the demo's lives issue in the final version but instead he made it even worse. Instead of 5 life pieces it now requires 3 to get an extra life which means you can get max lives as early as the stage 2 boss now. I can't even imagine how many resources you can get in the game once people actually start to develop routes for it. I played terribly for the first three stages and I still got max lives by the end of the third stage. Sanae's bomb is really good because she can graze bullets during her invincibility time, this helps a lot to get the amount of graze to pass the chapter bonuses. During some hard attacks you actually get rewarded for bombing since normally you don't get enough graze to pass the bonus for them. A lot of patterns feel like they were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced with real patterns later down the line but he apparently ran out of time. The final boss fires tons of patterns that are just bland rings of bullets, which is the first thing you learn to code in Danmakufu. Tons and tons of patterns in the game become incredibly stupid if the boss moves low on the screen. In SA there was one attack that had this issue but now there are like 20 of them. One of the spellcards of the stage 4 boss seems impossible to capture with Sanae because her shot makes the bombs explode right in front and next to her. Speaking of unbalanced in a different way, the stage 5 boss final on Lunatic feels like a Normal pattern. I was quite shocked by the final boss because it really is bad, it has no fun patterns to dodge and instead is obsessed with shooting bland sets of rings at you that require bullshit pixel-perfect micro-dodging to get past. I don't really know why ZUN does this since theoretically he should have all the time in the world to make a game and not have to rush something half-baked like this out of the door. On a more positive note he seems to have fixed the addictive blending mess of the stage 2 boss final which I can appreciate. Yeah it's one of the hardest in the series but maybe not for all the right reasons.

• published: 14 Aug 2015
• views: 77885