I find it amusing that lombard is the easier of the two to use now with his homing shots vs having to manually aim with hildengarde.
I got as far as stage 4 this time before I got hard filtered by the pentragram enemy thing that shoots red bullets towards you. It ended up camping at the bottom right corner of the screen and shot horizontally towards me. Not sure what I could've done there. Also felt like there was a drop in attack pattern quality between stage 2 and 3.
I had a lot of fun though. As a complete casual to the genre I thought easy mode was pretty fair and I especially appreciate the addition of lives + continues tyvm. The music is nice and I thought the story was charming.