Hmm. I have mixed feelings.
(I also wrote all this hours ago then got distracted by an annoying OpenGL implementation thing, so apologies if I'm re-treading old ground.)
The story is shaping up to be proper all-out visible-lasers fantasy-space-opera, which is a great starting point. The characters are pretty fun (although I could happily murder Asaga and not feel that guilty), and along with the music (mostly pretty appropriate) lend a great anime-esque air. (Although music transitions are a bit sudden - a bit of crossfade wouldn't go amiss.)
(To answer mikey's earlier question - it's pretty similar to
Starlight, really; like the pilot episode of a TV series that funding isn't secured for yet. The scene is set for a larger story, but there's also a smaller story which starts and ends within that three-episode download.)
The shooter segments, though, I didn't really get on with. There are several things I think could be improved. I'm only being picky 'cause I'm such a big shooter fan...:
- I would say that most of the battles are about twice as long as they need to be - especially for the first few episodes in an ongoing series. I nearly gave up on the Machiavelli just 'cause it was taking too long. :/ Endurance fights are, to my mind, no fun - they're harder not because you need a different skill, but because you need to play /perfectly/ to avoid attrition wiping you out in the long run.
- As far as I can tell, the only difference between 'easy' and 'bullet hell' and all the stages in between is how much damage is dealt by hits. So someone playing on easy still has to evade the same bullet patterns, they just get penalised a bit less for being hit. At the very least, I'd recommend not having the one-hit-loses-you-your-charge rule for VN and maybe Easy difficulty; I'd also suggest making the patterns easier or at least
slower for the easier difficulty settings, if not sparser, particularly since...
- Bullets are often incredibly hard to dodge. I say this from the point of view of a seasoned Touhou player... some of the individual patterns are easy, like the first one on the Machiavelli; others - like the later short-streams-of-red-bullets on the same boss - are so hard (unless I'm missing something fundamental) that it's near-impossible to evade them long enough to charge up all three ships. This is mostly a bullet-pattern-design thing, I guess, but it doesn't help that...
- I have little idea of where the hitbox for the ship is. It seems that some of the wings aren't vulnerable, but some of the empty space around the front is - AABB collisions? This makes it particularly hard to navigate it through tight gaps, though... (At first I had trouble 'cause it took a while for it to sink in that the other two ships weren't damagable while they were switched out...)
- I found it very hard to deal with the fact that after you lose a ship, you can only rotate your ship selection in one direction - with three I can rotate the ships around in a loop continuously, I was expecting to be able to do so with only two, and found it very distracting that I couldn't. :/
- Why limit the player to a very short area in the regular combat stages? It made dodging the missiles, for example, more difficult than it had to be... but more to the point, it made it more difficult for an apparently completely arbitrary reason. Thus, it felt rather annoying - I wasn't getting hit 'cause I wasn't good enough at dodging, I was getting hit 'cause I'd come up against an invisible wall in space which shouldn't really be there which prevented me moving upward enough.
I like the idea of the charge special attack, and it's mostly implemented pretty well. The loss of the charge gauge when you get hit is a nice mechanic, although after a while it did mostly result in me switching to the blue ship for the dodging sections then back to the other two for releasing charge attacks.
The only problem was that later patterns tend to have very hard-to-dodge sections, not to mention the up-close-homing-missile-during-your-own-turn attack, so it's often frustrating getting the charges off.
The turn-based system is... odd. It's a bit frustrating at times - like when I've just failed to release a special attack by a couple of frames and then been hit, losing the gauge - but it's an interesting way of giving a 'dogfighting' feel without having the player actually have to go through all the twisting and turning and without having to accomodate rotation or anything. I'm certainly not put off by it!