I'm fine with faith system; I'm fine with communication gauge, but if I have to be somewhere specifically in five seconds in a danmaku game, no thank you..
SA stage 1's large DNA-shooting fairies? :p (also, not exactly 5 seconds, but grazing implies memorization and hitbox knowledge -- also, if you want to hug bosses for grazing, you'll need boss hitbox knowledge too, when they have one, not to mention certain graze safespots which require pixel-perfect or near-perfect positioning, for example, Apollo 13, one of Kaguya's Last Spells, etc..)
I've got to try to let some enemies on the screen in order to make the faith counter not drop so quickly (since my memorization is terrible -- since I was a child, I preferred to understand things and had much more fun doing so than memorizing the same schoolwork), but I prefer PoFV's chaining, where I can feel the timer, can work with the timing of activated spirits (and it was also fun to activate them in places where I could chain more bullets, and in time for the fairy formations to be chained near them too), and can have more control over when I want the timer to keep going (it keeps going up while the fairy formation and spirits are being chained), or when I want it to be reset (for survival and boss summons/countering based on chain score)
edit:
As long as it doesn't involve me having to pick up things physically (and definitely not if said things have only a short time window for me to pick them up before they change to something that's VERY detrimental), go ahead.
for me, my problem with UFO is that there's an optimal UFO route, but I don't know it, and also probably would have a hard time keeping it in mind or internalizing it. Getting the UFO items, though, isn't nearly as difficult as chaining coins in Gunbird 2, or....... *RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEG* ..... getting gold bars at max value in Strikers 1945 II or...... *more RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEG* ...... chaining in Mars Matrix (which looks like MoF, except the faith counter isn't an exponential chain, getting faith items can bring your faith meter to full, instead of a cap of some 1/8 at minimum, which makes you literally have to make a item cube path, which can be disrupted by enemies not appearing if you didn't speedkill the previous enemies, and finally, the bullet reflecting system can screw your chaining in at least two ways: accidental bombing if you hold the shot button for too long, or mistiming on the really strict chaining -- you can release bullets and make them become cube items, but it's very possible that you lose your chain in the process -- or misaiming on these bullets) ... or.. *RAAA..ge
* .... powerups in the Raiden series, whenever you die. What you may need, is to get a timing on the UFO items you want to collect; wait for them to change, and keep the timing on your mind in order to decide if it's safe to collect them, or if you should wait (if you have an UFO at the screen, you can also collect the other UFO items on the screen while the UFO is active in order to improve point item value)
I'm fine with Cherry system
same problem with the UFOs I've stated above, you must know when to activate borders in order to graze more bullets during them, not only that, but in order to activate borders, you must know what to do to activate them (actually, Crimzon Clover's Original Mode has this problem, too, with the placements for Break Mode and Double Break Mode usages) and not trigger them accidentally before then
