I got Shooting Love 10th from Amiami yesterday and had a chance to play it a bit today. I was mostly playing XIIZeal, but the disc also has Delta Zeal on it which I only played once.
The menus are pretty basic, you pick which game you want to play, and there are difficulty and button options for each game. You unlock a score attack mode for individual stages as you clear them as well, but I havent tried that yet. It seems like those are the only modes, arcade or score attack, no special arrange modes. It also has online leaderboards.
As for the games, I guess I would most directly compare them to Raiden. They are pretty much old school vertical shmups, not bullet-hell.
Both games are pretty damn hard, you get 3 credits to start, and 1 is used when you begin, so only 2 continues with 3 ships per credit, so no credit feeding to get through the game. This doesn't change with the difficulty level, at least between normal, easy or very easy. It doesn't seem like enemies take more or less hits between difficulty levels, the main thing that changes is the amount of bullets on screen. Also I noticed in stage 2 of XIIZeal that there are actually different enemies on very easy compared to easy or normal.
In XII Zeal I've been able to get to the stage 5 boss so far, no idea how many stages there are. That was on very easy, I'm not very good at this game yet. They throw a lot of enemies at you and some of the bosses pretty much fill the screen. The first stage is pretty short and easy, but the difficulty ramps up at the stage 2 boss. Also the bosses have no life bars, you take them down by destroying their ship piece by piece, focusing fire on their guns that pop out from behind shielded panels.
There is only 1 ship type as far as I know, with a standard forward shot with like 4 levels of power ups that give it more power and a little bit of spread. A button is shot, Y button is auto rapid shot, B is bomb. You also have a side shot that is activated by rolling your ship with quick left and right movements on the stick. Luckily X is set for auto rapid side shot, I tried playing by flicking the side to side at first, and my forearm was getting tired pretty fast
Your movement speed is slower when using auto shot, which is typical. The side shot is more powerful but it has a somewhat limited range. It's pretty fun holding X and Y and laying waste to everything, makes me think of the death blossom from The Last Starfighter movie.
There is some kind of score boost combo that maxes out at x12 when using the side shot, and counts down when you aren't making side shot kills.
The complaints I have are that sometimes enemy fire gets lost in the background or when there are lots of explosions going on leading to some stupid deaths. The bullets don't have as much contrast against the background as Cave games for example. Also the hit box on your ship seems a bit weird, I probably just haven't gotten used to it.
I'd recommend the collection if you want to play a traditional 90's style vertical shmup. It has no story, characters or voice acting, just making stuff blow up.
I'm not much of a writer, but I wanted to leave a first impression of the game since it seems I might be one of the only people to import so far, hehe.
