Trouble Witches NEO! - A Quick Look

(Please note the photos in this entry i took of the Trial version last night.)

So finally was able to download the full version of this today and played it for a couple of hours, so far initial impressions of the game are fairly positive.

Open turning on the game you're presented with a variety of different game modes an Arranged 360 version of the game, the original Arcade version of the game as well as Challenge mode.

Within these modes you're also presented with additional modes, for example if you select Arranged 360 mode you can pick between story and single modes, and in challenge mode you can play 3 or 5 minutes score attack or boss attack.

The game has a voice option, so you can pick between English and Japanese, i've decided to currently leave it on English just because i find it pretty amusing how horribly bad it is (sounds almost like Vocaloid speech.) In Japanese the voice acting is good however.

Also located in the options menu is a how to play 'manual', which is pretty well presented, this also shows the various characters within the game. (Some of which you need to unlock, as well as the DLC character that hasn't been released yet.)

In the above two images you can see some of the characters within the game, the two highlighted were the ones you could pick in the demo. Including the DLC character there are about 9 playable characters total in the game, each with a different shot type and different 'familiar' shot type.

The actual game is visually quite pretty, with a 2D image background overlayed with 3D background and then the front layer of character sprites in 2D. (If that makes any sense...)

The game has been redesigned slightly from the original PC version, artwork has been redrawn and the graphics generally look alot more polished. The original version also had more of a general 2D look to it, as opposed to the 3D overlay in this one.

Although i haven't spent an extensive time with either version of the game i did notice their are more bullets in the Xbox version of the game.

In terms of gameplay the game starts out fairly easy and gradually the bullets come wave after wave thicker and faster, by the time i got up to the 5th and 6th levels (after many continues) i started to find it difficult to keep up with the bullets. Though in the first place im not a great shmup player.

Score attack mode in this game is very good fun, you basically play an altered version of the game and try to score as many points as you can within the time frame. Bullets come at you very quickly, and you don't have time to think of what to buy in the Pumpkin Girl Shop.

Whilst on the subject of the Pumpkin Girl, quite (in)famously in the original version you were able to use the wand cursor to poke her...You are still able to do this in this version but you can't poke her chest anymore...lol. 

Also something i noticed missing was the heart meter. When you poked her in the PC version some times a meter at the side lit up with hearts, though i never quite figured out what this was for...

As i mentioned about the Voice Acting in this game earlier this game also contains a ton of Engrish, quite alot of the time i can barely even understand what they are trying to say...lol.

Overall i am enjoying this game so far, with the amount of different game modes i can see myself playing it for a while (particularly score attack), for 800MS i think it is well worth the price. Hopefully it does well and SNKP publish more doujin games.

Below i've added some images of the original PC version so you can compare some of the visuals.

Enjoy!