I played on 03-04 June 2026, the NES version on NSO
Wanted to play this game because all the arcadeheads on twitter and youtube like to hype up the game design.
I definitely can see/agree with the points of how this game's design works extremely well. You have a few choices of power up, which you can select by collecting power up items in sequence - speed boost for one, air-to-ground missiles for 2, double shot for 3, laser for 4, "option" (a little guy that follows you around and shoots as you do) for 5, and a shield for 6. So the way to play this game is to figure out which upgrades to get at which point, and learn the spawns of the enemies that grant power-ups so you can pick them up. It's cool design. Otherwise it feels like a pretty basic shmup, I'd say my only other "issue" is that I'm used to Touhou when it comes to shmups, and in those games you can just hold the attack button to automatically attack at max speed, but in this game it's better to mash A to shoot. I don't see what kind of value that really brings.
Furthermore, when you die, you respawn at a checkpoint with all your power-ups lost, so you have to figure out how to recover from that situation. I found in the end that this was basically impossible to do in most situations, so my first clear was almost a "1CC", I died once right at the end and it was the only time I managed to still recover. I honestly think it would be harder to let yourself die in the middle of most stages and still manage to win, compared to just getting through the whole game in one go, since it's much easier with an un-upgraded ship to collect power-ups in the first 30 seconds of the game than it is anywhere else. I think this is a fatal flaw of the game's design, it got to the point where I'd just reset the game every time I died before stage 4 after my 20th or so attempt, rather than waste time trying to recover since it was just not feasible.
There's also a couple of traps throughout that feel like quarter munching (luckily playing the NES version means I don't need to deal with the cost): first is in level 1, the volcanoes. The second is in level 4, also the volcanoes. Lastly is in the final stage, there's a door that closes on you and you auto-scroll into if you aren't as far forward as possible on the screen. Ultimately these are pure knowledge-checks, not skill checks, despite what the arcade movement would have you believe. Though fortunately, I was actually able to recover well enough from the checkpoint at the last one to beat the final boss, with no upgrades except double.
All that said I do think there's a lot to learn from this game about good design. It's brutally hard, but completely fair since everything is exactly the same every time. In this way, the game naturally teaches the player to learn the strategies to beat the game, each stage at a time. I could do stage 1 with my eyes closed at this point, and stage 2 and 3 with very little trouble. Stages 4 and 5 I only saw a few times each before reaching the end, and stage 6 I beat on my first time there. Pretty much the whole game boiled down to working out an upgrade path at the beginning of stage 1 and then just treating it like Touhou and dodging bullets, except it's way easier than Touhou because the shield lets you get hit (strategy there is to always collect enough upgrades to instantly replenish the shield after it wears out). Oddly enough I would go as far as to say the game plays like a puzzle game - you're meant to work out a solution to the problem, rather than really thinking and making interesting decisions throughout to get to the end.
Music is a banger, the art is good, not much else to say on those fronts.