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.
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.