[WarpZone]

The attract movie you get seems to depend on which mode you played last. So play Story mode, quit, and then wait on the title screen and you'll get the movie. Favorite part: "they're appearing everywhere! 8... 16... 32!"
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[WarpZone]

Cave and Rising Star have both said it's playable on North American consoles (but not Japanese, iirc). The DLC requires making a European account I think.

Since Cave's allowing Rising Star to keep it open for import sales, I somewhat doubt they're looking for a North American publisher at this point.

I guess feelings are mixed on this one but being easier than DOJ with more scalable chaining sounds good to me.
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[WarpZone]

Kokuga impressions (I haven't played the stages near the top of the triangle yet) -

It controls great. Moving while rotating the turret and cleanly picking off enemies feels smooth and crisp. I was worried about using the touch screen for power-ups, but it feels much more natural than in games like Nanostray and Kid Icarus Uprising, and it's preferable to using face buttons to slowly toggle through your choices. Access is fast and direct.

The game isn't that interesting when just playing for survival, because you can creep through the stages slowly picking off enemies from a safe distance -- too many of them are stationary. Alternately, you can rush the Gatekeepers, instantly destroying the enemies they're associated with. Either way, you'll have plenty of power-ups to blow through the boss.

It gets more involving and difficult when playing for score, because weapon cards have multipliers that give you incentive to move into danger to efficiently speed kill enemies before the weapon sputters out. The feeling is that you've always got this reliable cannon to do slow business from the distance, but you're also carrying a set of fireworks that you have to decide where and when to set off, most only appearing once in the deck. So using each card is a real event, one you feel bad about spoiling with poor timing.

There are some cool nuances to this system. For example, you can 'combo' support and weapon cards, like using Stealth to move close enough to drop a x3 Spread Bomb safely. Or take the smart bomb, which is the strongest weapon but gives you x0 points and heavy damage to your own craft -- you could just ignore it, but then it's wasting one of your four slots. The randomization makes strategies feel unusually contextual, and the deck is well-balanced.

Bosses are a highlight as you squeeze any utility you can from the remainder of the deck, and they explore shifting weakpoints and the mechanics of rotation with a large amount of variation and flair that puts most shooters to shame.

Still, even though scoring well makes you use the cards very carefully, there's just not enough cards to use on everything, and you'll inevitably be in static situations where you're trivially picking stuff off, and many stages have multiple routes that require backtracking across empty areas if you want to find every last enemy.

This is when I realized the stages really are heavily designed for multiplayer -- the paths branch so you can split up with your friends and meet again, and you'd have enough weapon cards to work together for further scoring opportunities, as I believe every player gets the same deck of 20.

The nice thing about multi is you only need one copy of the game, but for the moment I'm probably not going to play much in depth after clearing all the stages. I'm not sure I can give a high recommendation if you're going to be playing this solo -- it's initially quite fun just to work out the logistics of the cards and play the bosses, but if you start paying closer attention to score and how the game is meant to be played, it's clear you're getting an incomplete experience with some awkward pacing problems without friends. For most shooters, 2P is a tacked on afterthought originating from arcade cabs, and just not something these games feel designed for. Kokuga feels more like a multi game from the bottom up.

The stage select structure is bizarre. Everything except the corner stages is open from the beginning, which is fine -- the game is all about bite-sized score attack multiplayer, sure. But then why have this veneer of progression where non-adjacent stages are locked, when you can just exit to the main menu to reopen them? It's not like there's cumulative scoring or resource management across stages. I'm curious if there is any purpose to it that I've overlooked, or if there was one that was cut mid-development.

Music is pretty good -- I'm so used to Namiki's approach to Cave shooters that it's nice to see his range trying something that feels more like a throwback to early 90's Mega Drive, almost.

Strong visual design is normally not a strength for G.Rev, such as Strania's confusing range of neon attacks or Under Defeat's camera slant that makes some patterns hard to read, but Kokuga finds a nice visual vocabulary to work with. The circular cue letting you know exactly when an enemy is going to fire is a nice touch that lets you play at closer range without worrying about cheap hits, something I think a number of other shooters could benefit from. Art direction creates an unusual contrast between realistic textured backgrounds and untextured VR, but it could have been done more imaginatively -- I think they wanted to keep the data transfer fast for multiplayer.
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