I approached this one cautiously optimistic, was gladly surprised by the new art, portraits and sprites look the best they have ever done in the series, everything looks so much cleaner (although I feel it lost a bit of that A.V DOSSOW spice), as usual the cutscenes and death animations were not disappointing, au contraire the full scissors one left me speechless.
I must admit the "Kawaii voice" took me out of the game sometimes because I too used to a certain Alesa that I formed in my head from previous games, this is not to say the voice actor was not great, I just could not make the connection.
The game is full of references to a lot of things I enjoy so I was really happy playing and looking at them, specially the PC minigame, it was amazing.
The story of this one may not be the most complex in the series (Hard to beat part 3!) but I feel it works just fine and helps develop the new characters and new Alesa lore.
This game is definitely one of the best that I have seen from you, that bike scene was SuperB and the song with vocals? way to go Mr. Dossow great job!
In the end I felt this game had a lot of "fan game" feeling over it (Not a bad thing), probably because of the influence of your talented collaborator, and that made me a little hard to reconcile this game with the others in the series, but that's OK, I also see this as an expansion of horizons and a lot of learning achieved.
About the message at the end, I am glad you keep making Alesa (or any) games despite anything and everything, as usual I don't have anything to offer but my words so:
Keep up the good work!