I decided to buy this from Steam. Actually ended up buying the $10 trilogy pack which turned out to be a bad idea as Exceed 2nd was the only game worth buying (and it's only $6). The other two are your standard bullet hell games and if you like dying pointlessly over and over you can pirate any of the Touhou games for free and they'll accomplish the same thing and are higher quality to boot. If you look at the game's page http://store.steampowered.com/app/207380/ it should be rather obvious that this is an Ikaruga clone meets Touhou where you shoot at magical girls instead of giant spaceships. But stealing from the best shoot 'em up has to offer can't be that bad, right? Usually such a story ends badly, but in this case, this actually works. You'll probably recognize the generic archtype of every Anime girl voice in this game (I guess Japanese voice actresses must be willing to work for next to nothing). Throw in a pointlessly cheesy fusion scene in the final boss and you've some kind of generic Anime in a shoot 'em up that actually plays surprisingly well since it stole from arguably the best shooter there ever was. Actually, it's better than that since whoever made the game realized that a hard shooter should allow people to use continues (you get 4 of them I think, even though it says credit 3 because 0 credits counts as one more continue), and you can stage select anywhere. As any veteran of shooter and especially bullet hell games should know, the last stage is the one where the game clownstomps on you so there's really no point to get familiar with stage 1 to n-1 if you can't beat stage n with all your ships, so you can skip everything and head straight to stage 7 (final stage) and get a head start on getting crushed.
By the way, the final boss is actually one of the most well represented magical girl type bosses I've seen. Here the voice acting helps a lot and this accomplishes what even Touhou series has failed to do since TH7, that the boss battle is supposed to tell a story as it unfolds. The final boss theme (Conquest) is really good too. It's kind of like how Touhouvania 2 is worth the $15 for the final boss theme and this game is worth the $6 for the final boss theme too, and it really goes well with the hysterical laughter that'd normally be annoying.
Since I didn't have much expectations on this game I won't touch too much on the game's problems (i.e. graphics obviously not too great, still stupidly memorization dependent), but rather I'll go over the genre. Ikaruga-clone games, in particular, seems to be 100% memorization as the dual polarity system basically ensures there's almost no way you can outreflex. If you didn't know where you're supposed to be at any given time you're already dead. The older shooters are supposed to games you have outreflex most part. Sure it helps if you know where everything appears in and what order stuff shoots at you, but you can usually get away by just having good reflexes except on the hardest bosses. Gradius on the SNES you can pretty much just move up and down and get past most of the stages that way, including bosses, until the very hard ones, and that's a good thing. You shouldn't have to memorize even regular layouts to have a chance at not dying. This obviously extends to bullet hell games in general though sometimes you can reflex your way out of a mess on the lowest difficulty setting.
Next, we'll go over the bomb and how it defeats the whole notion of 'bullet hell as art'. Here Ikaruga is probably the only game that gets it right. It should be obvious that there's a design philsophy of bullet pattern as some kind of art. In Ikaruga your bombs do not wipe out the screen so you can still see everything else. Compare to any standard shooter where your bomb wipes out all the bullets, which completely defeats the point of whtaever art you were trying to show.
Finally there's the issue of high end gameplay in a shooter should look beautiful, as an extension of the last point. Again look at a good replay of Ikaruga and it's an amazing thing to behold. This is virtually NEVER true in any other bullet hell games unless it's a TAS where people can do arbitarily difficult things. I decided to go to the Japanese equivalent of Youtube to check out how the Japanese do it and it basically looks like 'bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb some more'. Half of the time the last boss doesn't even get to speak because whatever your character says while using a bomb has priority in the speech (btw the game is not as hard as it looks because your bomb recharges in your invulnerability frame which leads to infinite bombs once you position yourself right). I don't know if I'm in the minority here but I play shooter 'em up while using as few bombs as possible because I always thought what makes these games fun is that you're dodging this stuff not just throw down a nuke on the enemy ship/magical girl until they blow up. The most egregious example of this is Touhou 6, probably one of the hardest shooters around. I downloaded a world record setting replay and I figured I'll learn how the Japanese masters handle Scarlet Meister and Fantasy in Scarlet on Lunatic, which is arguably the two consecutive hardest patterns in a Touhou game ever (and that'd put it in running in all shmups), and you see the world record setting replay starts with like 5 lives on Scarlet Meister and then just repeatedly suicide down to 1 life even though a complete novice can clear Scarlet Meister in about 2 lives (Remilia has a very short lifebar in this pattern), because the point is to die as many times as possible to reduce the hidden difficulty and I think people already worked out from a cost benefit analysis that the extra points you get for having more lives + points for clearing Scarlet Meister do not outweigh the risk you might fail to clear the final pattern, Fantasy in Scarlet. It's basically like the Olympic Badminton team where you'll always see guys dying worse than even the worst scrubs on this particular pattern just to try to lower the difficulty counter. And this is actually pretty common in bullet hell games since the top scoring runs seem to always encourage dying repeatedly to replenish your bombs.
By the way, the final boss is actually one of the most well represented magical girl type bosses I've seen. Here the voice acting helps a lot and this accomplishes what even Touhou series has failed to do since TH7, that the boss battle is supposed to tell a story as it unfolds. The final boss theme (Conquest) is really good too. It's kind of like how Touhouvania 2 is worth the $15 for the final boss theme and this game is worth the $6 for the final boss theme too, and it really goes well with the hysterical laughter that'd normally be annoying.
Since I didn't have much expectations on this game I won't touch too much on the game's problems (i.e. graphics obviously not too great, still stupidly memorization dependent), but rather I'll go over the genre. Ikaruga-clone games, in particular, seems to be 100% memorization as the dual polarity system basically ensures there's almost no way you can outreflex. If you didn't know where you're supposed to be at any given time you're already dead. The older shooters are supposed to games you have outreflex most part. Sure it helps if you know where everything appears in and what order stuff shoots at you, but you can usually get away by just having good reflexes except on the hardest bosses. Gradius on the SNES you can pretty much just move up and down and get past most of the stages that way, including bosses, until the very hard ones, and that's a good thing. You shouldn't have to memorize even regular layouts to have a chance at not dying. This obviously extends to bullet hell games in general though sometimes you can reflex your way out of a mess on the lowest difficulty setting.
Next, we'll go over the bomb and how it defeats the whole notion of 'bullet hell as art'. Here Ikaruga is probably the only game that gets it right. It should be obvious that there's a design philsophy of bullet pattern as some kind of art. In Ikaruga your bombs do not wipe out the screen so you can still see everything else. Compare to any standard shooter where your bomb wipes out all the bullets, which completely defeats the point of whtaever art you were trying to show.
Finally there's the issue of high end gameplay in a shooter should look beautiful, as an extension of the last point. Again look at a good replay of Ikaruga and it's an amazing thing to behold. This is virtually NEVER true in any other bullet hell games unless it's a TAS where people can do arbitarily difficult things. I decided to go to the Japanese equivalent of Youtube to check out how the Japanese do it and it basically looks like 'bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb some more'. Half of the time the last boss doesn't even get to speak because whatever your character says while using a bomb has priority in the speech (btw the game is not as hard as it looks because your bomb recharges in your invulnerability frame which leads to infinite bombs once you position yourself right). I don't know if I'm in the minority here but I play shooter 'em up while using as few bombs as possible because I always thought what makes these games fun is that you're dodging this stuff not just throw down a nuke on the enemy ship/magical girl until they blow up. The most egregious example of this is Touhou 6, probably one of the hardest shooters around. I downloaded a world record setting replay and I figured I'll learn how the Japanese masters handle Scarlet Meister and Fantasy in Scarlet on Lunatic, which is arguably the two consecutive hardest patterns in a Touhou game ever (and that'd put it in running in all shmups), and you see the world record setting replay starts with like 5 lives on Scarlet Meister and then just repeatedly suicide down to 1 life even though a complete novice can clear Scarlet Meister in about 2 lives (Remilia has a very short lifebar in this pattern), because the point is to die as many times as possible to reduce the hidden difficulty and I think people already worked out from a cost benefit analysis that the extra points you get for having more lives + points for clearing Scarlet Meister do not outweigh the risk you might fail to clear the final pattern, Fantasy in Scarlet. It's basically like the Olympic Badminton team where you'll always see guys dying worse than even the worst scrubs on this particular pattern just to try to lower the difficulty counter. And this is actually pretty common in bullet hell games since the top scoring runs seem to always encourage dying repeatedly to replenish your bombs.
