Wow you really went all out! Felt like playing a real Touhou. Not that I'd know. It feels professionally done, is my point. Staggering variety of bullet patterns, and very personality filled ones. The integration with the ren'ai aspects was very clever. Love the character portraits in the visual novel segment, wish there had been time for more. Great work!

I've been saving this one, and I finally had a solid bit of time, so I finally gave it a spin... a spin straight to completion!

Short version, probably my favorite game in the series to date!

Good graphics, especially the new character portraits! They are beautiful. It's a shame that they weren't all completed, but I imagine time got tight. What's there is really good though. The music is great as always, and the SFX are all good too.

I was worried going into this one that it'd be too hard. I saw many players saying it was. I'm also not a bullet-hell aficionado. But you know what? The difficultly felt PERFECT to me. I'm not saying that adding an easy-mode so players have options would be a bad thing... but I found the current difficultly just the right balance of challenging and satisfying. I thoroughly enjoyed the current balance.

The gameplay itself took me a minute to understand, but once I did I loved it. I've never played "Shoot the Bullet" so it was all new/fresh feeling to me. The dating VN aspect was all nice. If I had to nitpick anything, I guess maybe a little more work on the writing/dialogue could improve it a little. It wasn't bad or anything, just maybe not as engaging as the gameplay sections. Still, I appreciated all the routes and options. I think Cornelia's was my favorite, from a dating standpoint.

A couple of bugs/issues. During Ophelia's final date scene(I think it was her anyway), Cornelia's name and portrait appeared a couple times, but it didn't seem like it should have been her. That was the only I time I noticed anything like that though.

A very specific bug I found on Firefox: During the tutorial, if I take the first photo in Fullscreen mode, the entire screen gets "locked" into a clear screen of Cornelia and Angelica and the BG, and stays that way until I lose. I can hear the game playing and move around, and get hit. But I can't really play. If I start the tutorial in small-screen, it works fine. After that first photo, going fullscreen also seems fine from that point on. Though I didn't do tons of testing... ultimately I played it on Chrome instead.

Anyhow, this is one of the best games I've played for this jam so far, and definitely my favorite to date of the Tengoku series. Awesome work!

Full disclosure: I suck at bullet hells. I know Dogtopius knows that, but other folks flipping through the comments might not.

I love the concept here, but I found the difficulty insane; I couldn't even get past the first level. Even the first boss is similar in difficulty to the later bosses of previous games in terms of what it's throwing at you, and on top of that I'm trying to juggle the camera charging and get in for a photo before I get annihilated. It seems to be less forgiving than previous games as well, with no lives system and the camera not quite a substitute for bombs.

I'm not convinced that there's really enough room for the camera mechanic, but in addition to sucking at bullet hells I also suck at multitasking.

I gave up pretty quickly, and it's kinda too bad, because the screenshots of the Ren'ai part of the game look really good and I would have liked to have seen that.

this is clearly a very well made game. it looks fantastic, the music is catchy, and the mechanics seem pretty well polished. as for what the dates are like, i dont think ill ever know. 

there are some things that i think could definitely be elaborated on. theres no intro, and im not sure if theres supposed to be character interaction between stages (there didnt seem to be after the first, anyway). as i havent played your previous games, it means i have no idea who im pursuing. given the amount of effort needed to get the dates, adding a little character intro before you start might help make the reward seem a little more exciting.

it was not entirely clear to me what the rules were for getting hit -- sometimes a bullet would hit me and the only reaction would be a sound to indicate it, and sometimes id die the second one came near me. there are definitely moments where theres no way to completely avoid them, so having that information likely would have helped.

overall this seems like a great game, despite those things. i might try to come back to it at some point, but the difficulty does seem to be very far above my level.

Insanely well-polished Shoot the Bullet-like game, with great presentation and execution all around.

Most patterns are fairly interesting/engaging to play against (mostly due to their bullet speed), though due to the fact that they don’t(?) seem to increase in difficulty as you take photos makes some of them (particularly any of them that need more than 5 shots, or all of the early game spells being 5 shots) feel like they take longer than they “should”.

It would be nice if you were able to freely select stages (or at least reset the run entirely, given route-based structure), since once you finish a stage you can’t play scenes from previous stages again until you finish the route.

I’m not sure if this is an issue with my system (75 FPS monitor again), but the player’s movement feels very slightly more delayed/input-laggy than usual.

Very polished and well made game although it’s basically Shoot the Bullet but the art is awesome. The mechanics are extremely well implemented, they are top-notch with lots of play involved like using the camera to clear bullets, and the fact that there’s actually a short window to shoot the charged camera just before death just blows the Polish meter out of this world. Graze mechanics and Silky Smooth are also great. Music is very good; I like all of them except the 2nd stage music.

For criticism, I had a ton of fun with the SHMUP mechanics but I stopped after about 20 dates. The dating part is underwhelming. I didn’t like the fact that it’s shuffled for Stage 2 and I had to do other dates and wait for the next round before being able to see what’s next with my first date, it confused me at first. The way Ren’ai is integrated is almost entirely disconnected from the gameplay, I’m not even sure if there’s even a mashup, but at least there are some love themes. There is another submission, Elemental Guardians, which had love develop as part of its story and a few love scenes, but had absolutely no player influence on any relationship/friendship, i.e. no routes. If all Elemental Guardians needed to do was to add a menu at the end to choose which love scene to play to turn it into a Ren’ai game, then Ren’ai is just a UI requirement.

The dialogue also didn’t seem very developed or refined. Some magical girls don’t have portraits and it’s hard to identify their character and emotions, but I like their sprite designs and I like that their attacks reflect their magical abilities, which is a plus.

In all other aspects, Tengoku 2.5 is an amazing game. Its implementation is of the highest quality and for a SHMUP, it is one of the best and can be on par, if not better, than some Touhou games. To be able to achieve this amount of polish in a month deserves high praise. Excellent work!

I liked it a lot. If ZUN made Shoot the bullet easier it be this,  though I did try to get points by putting myself into the picture.

I did encounter Cornelia intruding on Ophelia's date though. Not exactly out of character, but I don't think that was intended.

Overall this is a great entry.

Also getting silky smooth is quite difficult. I find that on some patterns the amount varies greatly. Like sometime it's enough if half a pixel is in the shot, and at other times you need the whole leg. Might be just me though.

Fun game, although I think gets a bit repetitive. 

* it pains me to make the choice between  such nice art, pixelated or tiny

* I'd really love to see the photos and have time to read the text / points

* I think there is some missing art or bugs with some of the dialogue

Great job, I'm sure this game could be even better with some off jam polish =]

Darn it I have always dreaded playing StB I didn't think a jam participant would submit a game with StB concept to my jam XD

Anyways the art is different from your usual one and it's amazing. Your composition has greatly improved too; I swear I thought I was playing Touhou for real lol. While I do not enjoy Yuri I think I can also see the mashup in this game is done pretty interestingly; very well done.