Definitely cool of you guys to release this new version for free! Have been playing it quite a bunch over the last week, and wanted to mention some stuff I noticed.
First, some text stuff, which I hope I don't sound too nitpicky about:
- On the character select screen, the first line of Aino's description is missing a period at the end.
- Also on the character select screen, a "his" is used referring to Lempo.
- Some textboxes in the Aino vs. Näkki dialogue has some instances of an A appearing after a period at the end of a sentence.
- In the final textbox of Aino vs. Kivutar dialogue, there should be a comma after "Get ready".
- Aino vs. Kanteletar dialogue has one sentence that should have a question mark instead of a period.
- Talvikki calls Kade "him" in one line at the start of Chapter 3.
- Both Aino and Talvikki dialogue with Hongatar has the latter trying to say Väinimöinen and kinda... failing. Also some other name in the dialogue with Aino, åäö doesn't seem to want to show up. I don't think that would be an issue on my end? My computer locale and language is Swedish.
- Lempo vs. Hongatar dialogue has an instance of a missing comma.
- A number of dialogue boxes have instances of extra spaces between words. Those I have found are: Aino vs. Näkki, Aino vs. Kanteletar, Talvikki's start of Chapter 3, and Lempo vs. Hongatar.
Don't got too much to say about gameplay stuff, but a thing I definitely noticed was that it's not quite clear which enemy the "fire-spitting Kave bird" referred to in the Chapter 4 challenges actually is, which brought me some confusion - took me a while to notice that the enemy I thought it was, which looked like a bird and shot fire-coloured fire, actually seemed to be a frog with wings, and the humanoid enemies that I didn't think looked like birds at all were the actual ones.
And finally... maybe I'm missing something, I will note that I have so far not gone above Normal when playing, but Aino's Firewalker boots seem pretty bad. Talvikki's Icewalker boots are amazing and a big reason I consider her the best character, and Lempo's Voidwalker boots are great for a quick escape, but I can't find much use for the Firewalker boots. The only thing they seem to be good for are killing enemies appearing from behind immediately, but that's such a niche use compared to the other two. And managing to place a fire vortex on a boss didn't seem to deal much damage anyway. I did notice killing enemies with the vortexes spawned small score items, so is that what they're there for? I don't have any suggestions of what could be done with them, but I do feel there's a lack of character balance there.
...and just one last thing while I'm talking about the boots: Might I suggest adding some small graphical effect to Lempo's sprite while the Voidwalker boots are active, so you can see immediately when you run out?
Okay, that was a lot. I do like the game, if I didn't I wouldn't have bothered writing all that! When Aurora Edition came out I linked it in a variety of shmup-related places 'cause I wanted to spread the word about it, especially when you were so generous to give it out for free - and I did buy the previous version of the game!
/Kenny