Feedback after first playthrough

[avie!!]

Hi there! First off, I'm super happy and glad to see this great game remade! Cosmo Machina, you've done a really amazing job at adding some lovely visual flourishes to the game that make it stand out against the old PS2 versions, and the new cutscenes are super adorable as well.

I just have a short list of issues that I noticed when playing:

- The pacing of the game seems very fast compared to the original. New shells shoot out at roughly the same speed for an entire level whereas the original had variable speeds; the first level, for example, started out slow then gradually released them faster. Additionally, shells seem to expire alarmingly fast now, especially for easy mode. It makes getting anything over 3 Daisy extremely difficult. To test my theory, I played the original (Japanese) release of Fantavision on PS2 again, and was able to easily get a 4 Daisy within the first few minutes of Stage 1.

- Starmine functions completely differently, and not in a good way. For some reason, shells will sometimes not get affected by the chain explosions and just expire because it went slightly too high up. Sometimes, I'm able to catch a shell that has faded colours (thus meaning it's about to explode on its own) and that ends up making it not explode...which isn't remotely useful when all the other shells of the same colour have exploded already.

- I've also noted that it's somehow possible to break a chain in Starmine whilst playing it exactly as intended which isn't right at all; if I'm remembering correctly, you only broke your chain in Starmine if you failed to explode a shell, it never expired on its own.

- I only ever got 1-2 colours per Starmine round and when it was 2 colours, they were always separated evenly from each other. Again, I recall the original giving you 3 colours sometimes and mixing the shells together to make it a bit more tricky. Is that stuff only in hard mode?

- The amount of bonus items spawned during gameplay is obscenely high compared to the original. Managing to achieve two Starmine rounds in a stage used to feel like an achievement but I was able to successfully do it every single stage in this version of the game. Again, might just be an easy mode situation, but it contrasts weirdly with the high rate of shell expiration and rapid energy loss that can happen. It feels very imbalanced overall.

- Sometimes when pressing the Explode button, the shells I have selected wont actually explode. It requires a second press of the button to work. I know it's not because I don't have enough shells selected to explode them because it simply deselects them all if that's the case. Usually it happens when a chain explosion is going on for a different colour, which is kind of weird. I should be able to just keep popping off explosions so long as I'm able to keep chaining them together, surely?

I think that's about everything. It's a lot, I know, and some of it won't be able to be fixed. But I hope you will at least consider some of my feedback and rebalance the game a bit. I'm not new to the game at all, I've poured hours into the old PS2 versions because I love it so much, so to see these weird discrepancies is a bit sad. Thank you very much for your time and hard work on this otherwise excellent game.

[Tim]

Thanks for your detailed post. What version would you recommend for the best gameplay experience?

[avie!!]

any of the original ps2 versions will sort you out nicely. you got four to choose from with small differences between them, the biggest one being soundtrack choice

though honestly this version is fine too, it just needs a patch or two.

[Tiller]

Yep it needs to slow down, the pacing is too damn fast compared to the original and makes it feel like the whole game is a speed run. Not as fun.

[avie!!]

still sad to see the game hasn't really been updated much at all since I last played it tbh...really had high hopes for this but oh well

[Tiller]

Originally posted by avie!!:

still sad to see the game hasn't really been updated much at all since I last played it tbh...really had high hopes for this but oh well

They are launching a physical PlayStation version, so hopefully they will do more and it does't end up abandoned.