Some first impressions on the English Demo:
The game looks great, but I feel as if some of the art is a little bit blurry, despite setting it to 1980x1080 and testing on both fastest and fantastic quality settings. The effects are a little too much for me, with all the combo flashing on the sides of the screen and the massive explosion effect when you hit a note, blocking what notes you can see. The note explosion effect feels so laggy.
The music is absolutely beautiful. At times the audio can be too loud, so hoping that there is an option to adjust this later on. I also like how you unlock the story as you play through the songs, although it's not really explained precisely how you unlock chapters and songs, other than to keep repeating a song until you get a good score or something.
I've already spent my entire day playing this game, it's too addictive.
Suggestions:
- I think it good if there was an option to play in borderless windowed, since I frequently multitask on multiple monitors.
- An option to skip cutscenes or revisit them would be good too.
- There should be an in-game options menu for the Controls, Audio, Gameplay/UI etc. in the final version.
- The clickable area for the left and right arrows in the tutorial window aren't very clear, so I keep closing the window instead of moving on to the next page. It might be better to close the window through an "X" or return button, instead of by clicking anywhere on the window.
- The "Press to Play" is a little misleading, as you need to click above where the Judgement Line would be. I initially tried clicking on the "Press to play" text itself, and then around the text which also didn't work.
- During gameplay, I found it hard to do precise notes without hit sounds. Something like a simple click or "ding" sound when the player hits a note will be enough.
- I often lose track of which notes each line represents as the note count increases. Perhaps if there is a better distinction to better indicate which lines are which finger or hand? Something like having a default tone of grey -> light blue -> dark blue, then a line separating both hands?
- I feel the note hit effect should be made smaller to be less intrusive, and significantly sped up so that it goes away faster. Maybe even an opacity setting on it would be good.
- The game is insanely difficult once you begin playing on Hard. Even Easy mode on Eve is terrifying. I don't see myself getting a decent score on that one anytime soon...
Bugs:
- When opening the tutorial after closing it once on page 2+, any text or images that was on the page will remain there when you reopen the window, overlapping first page.
- Pausing at the beginning of the the song will desync the music from the notes. The music will start playing before the notes arrive. Pausing repeatedly will make it worse. This only occurs at the beginning before the song actually starts, and there is no issue during the song.
- Sometimes the audio crackles and the game slows down significantly while you are playing a song. My CPU, GPU, and memory usage all seem to be perfectly stable when this occurs, so I don't know why it starts to stutter like this. It happens randomly and goes away after maybe a minute of playing. This is a really annoying issue, as it starts to slow down or speed up the song significantly.
- The last page on the tutorial should read "Introduction to game controls are finished. Please the start button to start the game.", as there is no right arrow on screen.
Other notes:
- I also noticed that the FPS of the approaching notes are really low at lower speeds. At the default of Speed 3, the notes seem to run at 15FPS or something, while at Speed 6 it begins to run smoothly. When you play at Speed 1, you can clearly see the notes skipping towards you.
- There some places in the text throughout the game that seem to have double spaces, or lack spaces. But I'm glad that so far there hasn't been many examples of poor translation like there was in the trailer. I do feel like some of the wording could have been written a bit better, but it doesn't really take away from the enjoyment of the game.
- Easy difficulty feels like playing on normal or hard, while hard feels like playing on pro. I'm really bad at these rhythm games, so that's no surprise there, but there are just so many notes and patterns I can't begin to keep up on any difficulty past easy mode. O_O
- I've FC'ed 2 Easy mode songs so far, but I'm too bad at it to get any more :(