I'm a sucker for magical girls, princesses, and dystopian sci-fi, so the story is major draw for me. I love the art here, too, it's bright, colourful, and looks great.
I found the UI unbearably cumbersome to navigate. It's not always intuitive what's up and down versus left and right, the cursor doesn't always line up with what's being selected, and it's especially unclear which lane is being aimed at. I really wish I could just, you know, use the mouse. I feel like this game would work so much better if I could just point and click at things instead of stumbling around with the keyboard.
There are some non-obvious mechanics to the combat, but I was never quite sure if I couldn't do an action because it wasn't allowed at that point or because of the UI. There are a lot of mechanics at play and a surprising amount of depth, but it really needs a tutorial or slower introduction. There's definitely potential but I just kinda ended up lost.
The game didn't crash, but it also didn't load on my browser (Microsoft Edge Version 138.0.3351.55 (Official build) (64-bit) on Windows 11 x64) even after waiting quite a while, eventually throwing a tab unresponsive warning. It did seem to work better in the itch app.
The devlog is adequate, but I wish it talked about where the project came from and how feedback from the last jam turned into action items, because I wasn't around for its initial release.