My Ibara adventures, for this week, have been limited to a long session on Saturday (yesterday). Satisfying in the long distance, as i reached once the final stage, but i really am getting mad with some of the small changes....

Namely:

1) Lowered point-blank distance: I mean, Yagawa, no. It is unadmissible that i am supposed to point-blank stuff and said stuff shoots at me if i'm not hovering on it, and will do this at cornering points if it can. There are simply too many traps, like for instance the whole train stage (3), in which a pixel of excessive distance means a spread pattern on the nose, hence automatic death.

2) Aura Damage: oh dear, let's say that i don't want a power-up. I am playing in the practice mode as well, to get a grasp of rank increase. Well, power-ups, especially small icons or the simple pods, give a very small increase in the rank-per-second value, but still, i *don't* want to rely on random power-ups to trigger aura attacks on fixed spots. "Random" and "fixed" don't mix well together, and again the whole third stage seems to be focused on this.

3) Dashing enemies or death from behind: again, no. Ok, there are enemies popping up from behind only on the last stage, but i can't accept that some enemies can dash against me and get a free hit because they do half a screen in a 1/4th of a second.

4) Invicibility in the upper 1/8th of the screen. No, i mean, it seems to work only for pop-corn enemies, but it is still blatantly pointless. Please keep this Cave bullshit in proper Cave games, where invincibility in such cases=chaing going.

5) Flame throwers. I can't see them properly, chromatic choices should be taken by considering that most of us fans are poor-sighted, after years of nerdy shmupping, thanks.

From you can read here, i may sound like i find the game badly programmed. Mind you, these are small flaws, but are flaws nonetheless. I plan to write a review, soon, but the core concept is: great game, too cheap in some of the tweaks to the basic engine.

But, dear Mr. Yagawa, please remember, for your next work...

R