Playing this pretty late! As others have said, the graphics and audio are nice, the story just enough to fit the theme.

Some feedback per category:

Performance: I had an issue with my monitor flickering in fullscreen, even after making sure refresh rate was 60Hz not 59Hz. But an alt+enter to toggle windowed mode, and it was alright, I could play in Low Quality mode.

Progression: difficult to train as there is no menu to start from any game phase. In particular, there was no way to skip the tutorial so redoing everything until you reached the phase you haven’t learned yet took some time (same issue with most shmups with no level/section selection). Fortunately, the Story mode can be used to reach any point in the game easily (but you still need to take some time). The last part is probably easier than the second one because the hitbox of the enemy boat is huge, so you can sometimes stay under cover and still hit. With the exception of the tidal waves (probably a little too frequent, in fact) that requires you to jump very high. The thunderstorms were interesting, it seems the only way to dodge them was to jump aside and come back (roll can help).

I was positively surprised by the number of phases and parts, I thought it would stop after the 1st part! In fact, in the difficulty settings, besides changing initial protagonist HP, I think you could add an option to change the damage per seconds of the main attack. Because each phase is pretty long already, but there are many phases and 3 parts, so I think it you have enough material and variety to keep the player’s attention. Rather, changing phase often, as in Touhou bosses, would keep the player’s attention even more. And players who play more aggressively (hiding less behind the cabin and aiming continuously at the boss) may also feel rewarded. Combine this with either more initial HP or HP recovery between parts, and you can have an intense experience where, in fact, you decreased difficulty, but the player will still be under pressure because the bullet patterns are the same and they can still die, but it’s up to them to get out of cover and deal more damage to the boss quickly to finish the phase.

Finally, Sin & Punishment-style, you could add an option to enable checkpoint for every part and/or boss phase, for a hybrid between pure Store mode and still requiring the player to master a certain phase before proceeding.

Gameplay: I like the concept of 3D bullet hell, but combined with precise shooting (except for part 3) it made it quite difficult. The boss hurtbox seemed more generous than I thought, so I gave up on always right-button hold aiming which prevented me from seeing around and put me too much in danger, only aiming from far and maybe occasinally recalibrating with right-button hold for a short time.

I’m used to Sin & Punishment gameplay where bullets are coming from the front, and a classic left/move + jump is enough to dodge most bullets. Sin & Punishment 2 adds flying so vertical motion, but you stay in place in the air and bullets still coming from the front + special bullets and lasers covering the screen in 2D patterns, so it’s all manageable as you don’t have to rotate the camera, basically.

This game and also other shmups also feature many intermediate enemies that act as small rewards. In this case, the other targets are the ghost ships, that you have to destroy to protect yourself (it seems that a ship crash causes you 1 damage, and in the whirlpool, some ships don’t crash but may touch you), but you don’t “gain” anything except surviving. In shmups, it’s less a problem even if small enemies don’t give much score or power-up because your straight fire will probably hit other units anyway, so it’s all in one go, but here, you have to switch to weapon 2 and hit just one specific ship, which means you hit no other ships and most importantly, you stop dealing damage to the boss. After realizing that I was spending my time destroying ships for nothing in the whirlpool, I switched to just attacking the boss, but if I wasn’t in Story mode, the many ships would kill me in no time. Maybe if destroying a ship was consuming some of the boss’s health, it would be more beneficial. Generally speaking, I think there are too many ships in the whirlpool section, unless I misunderstood and some of them were not hitting you but just for show.

I do understand why there are not a bunch of small enemies though, it would be even harder to hit them all in 3D while also hitting the boss (again, unless they all consume the boss HP), so having just bullets and big enemies may be better in a format where the boss is always present (if there are only minions as in Sin & Punishment, or that MechJam III game CyberLancer, that would be feasible).

The roll goes a bit far and the character doesn’t blink so I’m not sure if it provides invincibility frames or if it’s just a move to evade.

Characters: the familiar is fun, but I didn’t notice it during the game, only in the last scene, I suppose it was disturbing the player?

Exceptional graphics and great optimization on the build too. The gameplay was a bit unwieldy, however, the animations and controls were very responsive. Good job!

Unfortunately my laptop is a potato when it comes to 3d games so I can only rate what I've been able to play.

A very good game on all points. If there is something to change, Song stays in a falling animation after a roll instead of returning to a standing animation.

Keep it up!

Whew, that was tough but fun! Took me 3 tries on Normal mode.

I don't know if I have a lot of new feedback, other than echoing what others said! The atmosphere/graphics/style was all really great! The ocean and boat setting felt very unique, and it was all well-realized. The story at the end was cute and funny, I enjoyed it. Overall I think this was really great! I suppose I have a few nitpicks so it's not all gushing...

First, I liked the story, but i wish there was more at the start. I had no idea why I was chasing and fighting this ghost girl. I imagine this is a time-constraint issue mainly. Second, a little more feedback when hitting the ghost girl might be nice... a louder sound, more visual feedback. As it stands, it's OK, but kind of hard to tell if I'm hitting without glancing at the health bar, which is tough while dodging and fighting. The last nitpick that came to mind was that the mouse sensitivity felt a little low. I really had to swing my arm to get the camera to move around, especially when a ghost boat was approaching from behind.

Nitpicks aside, this is definitely a top contender of MGGJ6! Great work.

I played the initial version so some of the stuff I'll bring up might already have been fixed.

This is, visually and aurally, the most impressive game in the jam I've played so far. There's one or two that might unseat it, but I'm not certain of that. The stylized boats and characters, smooth water, and carefully constructed lighting look great, and the mix of music, ambiance, and effects adds a ton to the experience. There's some great little cutscenes and animations, too. It's hard to put into words; it needs to be experienced. It may all be kitbashed together out of assets, but it doesn't have that asset flip feel and it's put together so well I don't care. Even the untextured jumbo restaurant didn't take away from it much.

I'm glad there was story mode because the game is way too hard for me. I can sort of dodge bullets and shoot at the enemy at once, but not if they're coming from different directions. While I was doing that, the ghost boat would sometimes come out of nowhere and at best I'd see it but not have enough warning to actually charge up an attack. Not being able to dodge bullets for shit is my problem, but I feel that the ghost boat should have more warning.

At least there's some stuff on the boat to take cover behind.

The story was both shorter and sweeter than I'd expected. I was expecting the game to be much longer for some reason (and maybe it was at some point?). It was paced pretty good, though, and the ending didn't come across as super abrupt or shoehorned in. I did feel the dialogue in the ending was a bit weak, and the dialogue interface wasn't up to the standard the rest of the visuals set.

As always, I love seeing the local connections and glimpse into Hong Kong culture, even if I don't understand most of it.

EDIT: One thing I should mention is that this game is incredibly demanding. Understandably so, but I think some people will have trouble running it. It mostly ran well for me, but certain effects like the ghost boat appearing caused the framerate to dip hard. This is on a laptop with a Ryzen 7 5800H and an RTX 3060 (mobile). I don't know if the newer version has some performance improvements.

Alright then,

It took me 3 days and like 10 attemps to beat it, All animations and models are top notch (even through not all of them were made specifically for this jam, still good job). The climat and story are pretty good too. The music is neat actually.

I also love the attack of throwing ships at you, and making this big whirwind

Maybe, but really maybe the only thing I would add is some more interactions with enemies (by that I mean like boss summoning smaller creatures that can be easily killed off), also some more things to do with attack 2 than only destroying ships. But the game is masterpiece even without these ideas. :)

Overall great job!

I loved the aesthetics and the concept,the game it's fun,  I had a hard time understanding the mechanics and controls at first. but overall it is very good, good work!

Hello, very fun game! Took me about 5 tries to beat it on normal mode, then I tried a couple times on Sadistic to  see what it was like, but wasn't able to win. In general I think the gameplay is enjoyable, and not too difficult to get the hang of, especially since most of the attacks are pretty well telegraphed. It might be more of a problem if you plan to have bullets that come from all sides of you, but for what you have here, it was easy to get the hang of. 

I think the inclusion of then local culture didn't take anything away from the game, and seeing what you had to say about them in the game page made me more invested. I think adding some of the stuff you said on the game page on the fun fact screen in-game would have been nice too, since I didn't make the connections from the pictures until after I reread the page. Also I can click the images, but I don't think they did anything when I did. 

For the learning curve, it may have been just me, but I struggled the most during the whirlpool section, I think the distance made it harder for me to tell if I was hitting the target. Compared to that, the final section was a bit easier for me.

Edited to add: Also I would have appreciated a tool tip about using the shield. I saw the controls for it in the options, but when I started playing I completely forgot I had that option. You may not want them to be forced to use it during the tutorial part though, so maybe a quick reminder before the proper fight starts would help.

I also wanted to say that I liked the ascending tones counting how many jumps you've used, and having Song make her noise once you're out of jumps.