Lol! This cute game is like Ikaruga!

[Arala Cran]

Seriously, big improvement compared to the 1st. Short review. Disregard if redundant but my first time trying it out so I have to admit.First off, there's NO lag compared to the 1st game's painful 10~12FPS, and also the controller finally works in this version too! Nice for a Vet SHMUPer like me (well I'm no pro though) and on top of that, I saw all the barrage of the plasma storm coming at me so I panicked, dodged but then quickly realized two polarity type elementals here. Stupidly I bumped into a White bullet but "Aaaah! Did I... wait? what? I'm not dea-- chain boost? LOL! Is this like Ikaruga!? Well then...!" XD

More like a slightly easier, cute version of Ikaruga, but NOT something to be careless in! O_O
Ok that's all I have to say, deciding if I should add this as a review or just some trash talk awaiting deletion. XD

[Cake]

Slightly easier? I can 1CC this on Exceed, but usually die at stage 2 in Ikaruga on easy.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

The first game has one fix which brings up the game to a slow-ish yet playable speed, instead of the painfully slow speed which I've experienced natively on Win8.1. (I think Win7 makes it slow-ish but playable by default?) This can be applied to the replacement executable that contains the translation. There's another patch to the original executable that makes it full speed, and also includes a translation.

What I've heard is that this second game is actually faster-paced and more chaotic than Ikaruga. Also, the second game has adaptive difficulty -- I dunno what Ikaruga has with regards to that. As a result one of my friends says that the second game is actually noticeably more difficult than the two other eXceed games. I don't know how it compares to Ikaruga though.

Fun fact: This came first to PC and to Steam, even though overall Ikaruga was released two years prior to this game's release.

[Squire Grooktook]

Originally posted by Naszrador:

Slightly easier? I can 1CC this on Exceed, but usually die at stage 2 in Ikaruga on easy.

I have 1cc'd Ikaruga normal and 1 life cleared ex2 on exceed difficulty.

I'd say Ikaruga is only slightly harder, but for different reasons.

Stage 3 and 4 of Ikaruga have a few "puzzles" that are really really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard if you don't know how to handle them, but are relatively easy and consistent if you know what you're supposed to do. Stage 5 on the other hand is a massive difficulty spike where almost everything that gets thrown at you is somewhat random and you have to rely on reflexes a lot.

Exceed has more stages, but ramps up slower, and there aren't any "puzzle" patterns that will ♥♥♥♥ your ♥♥♥♥ up if you don't know what you're supposed to do. I'd say the last fight in Exceed is harder then anything in Ikaruga *except* the aforementioned stage 5.

So Ika is only *truly* harder for the last boss. The rest of the game seems more daunting due to the learning curve, but the "true" difficulty once you understand the stages is pretty much the same.

This is purely for survival play though. Ikaruga has a much deeper score-game then exceed.

[Cake]

Just your quickly rechargable bomb makes Exceed already a lot easier imo, where as Ikaruga doesn't have any.
And it seemed to me like Exceed had simpler to solve patters, but I guess thats part of the learning curve you mentioned.

But I guess I can't really compare them if I never got far into Ikaruga without spamming continues.