Feathered Ether's development blog has just got a new post after more than a month of silence, and from what Google Translate tells me, the author had a bit of a break and is contemplating changing <things>... I wish I knew Japanese and could read that in more detail, though, and encourage him on his work.
Speaking of Stella Vanity, does anyone know how to score as well as on the replays on the website? I can't really make it past 35-40 million on stage 1, but it's apparently possible to score three times that much. There seems to be a lot more bullets on screen on those replays, but I can't really reproduce that even without firing...
May the divinities hear you.
I'm sure nobody will agree but I kind of stopped caring StellaVanity after the second trial release. Previously, the original trial (0.10, which I still check now and then) was almost perfect and got me all hyped! It looked gorgeous, had great music, imposing enemies and had this cool and fine tuned Espgaluda-like system where you activated a pseudo-kakusei mode and enemies released more and more bullets (and you could manually cancel the mode anytime), which gave you BIG SCORE BONUSES (c).
Later on he decided to ditch that scoring system and replaced it with some terrible and more obscure Progear hybrid monster (
Oh, hi! What's that jewel counter down there? D?j? vu? Oh no!!!!!!!) I could never get into, reduced the size of the enemies (or I'm getting blind), cut the length (and therefore, "epicness" =P) of the stages and thus destroyed the synchronised events (no more sub-boss on second stage showing up on the bridge-chorus moment of the song, no mid-boss on first stage showing after the break, etc.), he put a gross fadeout on the songs, he is apparently adding dialogue (which I hope will be skippable) and...
... and the main character somewhat looks like an older version of that little girl from Arakawa Under the Bridge, which I think is also called Stella so it makes me suspicious if any of the authors played the trial or something :V *conspiracy engines on*
In short: The high point is that the enemies are at least varied, with huge mechanical subosses and bosses, another cue to Espgaluda. But the scoring now annoys me terribly, the new character is rather uninteresting and I'm hoping the guy will take his time and rethink things a lot before releasing... Especially with Crimzon Clover coming with its 120% explosions and 0% moe tag and "hueg" enemies with destroyable parts and bosses going berserker on the player.
Argh, guess one can't keep everyone happy. Even though I'm a fierce doujin defender. I will probably still give it a try once it's finally released :derp:
