I've heard the sequels are better and I'm inclined to believe. It's short enough to beat in a few hours but still manages to feel very grindy by nature. The first half of the game has a few stages that feel like unnecessarily sharp spikes in difficulty designed to invoke this, including one that essentially forces you to rely on one particular ability that I had completely ignored until then, meaning I had to spend some more time grinding money to dump upgrades on it. After that you get a powerup mode which makes the rest of the regular stages considerably easier if you manage to get good RNG setups to use it.

The final boss fight however is an unforeshadowed switchup which is not only unnecessarily protracted but also makes you redo the entire last regular level when you die; this combined with the game's Ys 1 control scheme of attacking enemies by running into them at the cost of your own health (though for this particular boss you only take damage if its projectiles hit you) makes the encounter excessively tiresome. Even the hidden gimmick that's meant to make the fight easier isn't much help; you can use the controls that would ordinarily aim the witch's attacks to steer where the boss's projectiles are fired, the problem being that this is right stick on other versions but L and R in this one, meaning you cannot hold a specific angle, and letting go of the buttons means the boss goes right back to tracking you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem in the end if not for the very last phase in which the boss starts firing little laser shots that bounce off the edges of the screen and quickly turn things into the hell part of bullet hell which is only aggravated by the aforementioned awkward control scheme, and being unable to force a specific angle for them means the aiming gimmick is effectively useless. After punishing my thumb for a while I had enough and gave up.

In retrospect it was oddly similar to Fairune 2 in many ways, counting the system I played it on, the oddly specific way you interact with the enemies, the gameplay experience largely falling flat as a whole, and the unexpected final boss switchup although the former game fared much better in that regard. If there's one positive thing I can say about it it's that the aesthetics and gameplay flow for the regular stages reminded me a lot of Vampire Survivors even though the developers apparently have nothing to do with each other.