Recent reviews by Sonata

I picked this up after looking at the RPG/Bullet Hell mechanics, and thinking that this is right up my alley. What came along with it was a story that was at times hillarious, and the other times, utterly heartwrenching.

This is not only one of the best games to come out this year, but something that truely deserves to be called a classic.

If you have not played this game, you need to play this game.

On the one hand, I have to reccomend this game. It's free, a decent bullet hell SHMUP, and kinda fun. The music is fine, the pixel-art aesthetic is cute, individual character designs seems interesting by themselves (especially the final bosses), and the lives system specifically is something I find fairly interesting from a developer standpoint. Also, the scoring system is decent, which helps.

BUT BOY IS THIS A FLAWED GAME. The biggest problem here is the bombs/aura system. On the one hand, dying in this game is fairly forgiving; in general, the patterns are easier than a lot of other games, and it gives you a short period of time to bomb once getting hit, like in Touhou, so you don't lose a life. The problem is that once you die, your aura doesn't reset, meaning that once you start dying and have no bombs left, chances are you will keep dying until you have to use a continue. Combined with the fact that your power level will decrease every time one dies, and I found myself having to slog for almost a minute through a single pattern until the timer FINALLY ran out. At that point, that just overly punishes dying, and leaves barely any room for player mistakes. The player is basically required to learn how to play perfectly.

That being said, one can practice every single stage on any difficulty using the "Training" mode, without having to unlock them first, so players can actually learn how to play perfectly.

BUT, that just leads into the other problems I have with this game. While the dev seems to understand how to make good, challenging, patterns, they are SUPER generic, especially if you've played other bullet hell games. I found myself saying "Oh, this is Cirno, just modified a little" or "Huh, that looks an awful lot like Mokou". They feel slapped together and inconsistent, without any definable traits that can be given to the characters or their patterns. Speaking of characters, the game barely has any definable ones. The characters just seem thrown together from a grab-bag of different stories, and they have barely any defining characteristics, including their bullet patterns or their music. I admire that the game seems to try something a little different, adding a surrealist bent to it's story (SPOILERS: The overarching theme of facing/dodging one's greatest fear), but I don't beleive that that was intentional. There's just too much inconsistency in the aesthetics and the story for that to be true.

In short, as a "Touhou-lite" game that you can play just for fun, this comes with a tentative reccomendation, especially as it is a free game. Just be aware that the flaws are rather first-gamey, and that it's not as engaging or coheisive as a main-line Touhou or any other bullet hell.