I recommend this shoot 'em up to everyone who anyone who is interested in getting into the genre but may be intimidated with games by CAVE or other shmups that are more intensive. It took around 3 hours to clear on Normal.

The first 4 stages are not too intensive but it picks up around stage 5 and stage 6 and resembles the more classic or Toaplan/Raizing like affairs, with some fast and tricky patterns to dodge. The game is very forgiving with lives and bombs. There's a meter that refills 3 bombs slowly, and when you have all three, there is an autobomb. Bombs are strong. Additional ships also assist you when your power is maxed out by blocking bullets and collecting more heart medals for score.

It's functional ad has an enjoyable enough plot but has really poor difficulty balance, it switches from braindead to frustrating with literally 0 inbetween at around when you make it to town, it's hard to tell bullets form backgrounds, enemies start taking cover far more often and even teleporting randomly, to the final boss who even has an attack with no time for anticipation as you just get crushed by it, can't even bomb it. You aren't even safe outside your bubble during a bomb which makes it not very useful for getting out of a tough spot.

Also no, a million shots that just home at you is not level design.

Super solid shmup with a surprisingly affective story about the way christian-patriach culture brutalizes women for taking control of their sexual agency. It's a pretty good DDP-like in addition to that; the two components tie a clean knot thanks to strong theming and good sound direction.

It's not perfect tho. Visual clarity is far and away the most nagging part of the experience. Bullets easily blend into your sprite's similarly-colored hair. Enemies tend to have very little visual presence since they're mostly villager NPC's that blend in with the other NPC's you rescue, on top of also being able to hide behind background elements for cover. Then you got some enemies that stealth-dash between obstructions fucking ninja gaiden style, and your options which are also NPC-shaped and poorly-colored. So it leads to you going through most of the game not really knowing what you're shooting at, and not really feeling like the stuff that's hitting you is fair. It's that awkward difficulty balance of having hard moments but not really being too hard, which makes the scattered deaths feel like slaps on the wrist instead of challenges to overcome. All these problems really culminate near the end; I breezed through the first 6 stages on my first credit, then took 30+ retries to beat the last stage.

Good game otherwise, it's really cool to see the continuing trend of shmups diving deeper into storytelling, and I'm glad the genre hasn't been held back by heteronormative expectations that latch onto other sectors of gaming. Call it the perks of being in the same extremely niche subculture as Touhou.