BLUE WISH DESIRE

Whoopsies!~ Seems like I have forgotten to review Blue Wish Desire! Blasphemy!!!~
Unlike most of my reviews which have a habit of perturbing Steam's character limit, I'm going to keep this one simple(r) and cut to the chase: if you love STG's then you owe it to yourself, the community, and the developer to buy this game.
At full price.
X.X Gameroom is a stellar developer who has actually released pretty much all of their games for free. Blue Wish Desire is the first time I ever recall X.X releasing anything with a price tag attached to it, and I'll say it upfront: you're getting an incredible amount of value here. Blue Wish Desire is a down-to-earth chest-thumping (with the music to match) arcade-style STG with a scoring system similar-ish to the chips from Ketsui along with bullet patterns which take a lot of inspiration from Touhou.
It's a match made in heaven. At its core though, Blue Wish Desire is your typical five-stage STG with both a boss and mid-boss in each stage and tons of enemies in-between. Where Blue Wish Desire absolutely shines though is the immense amount of precision in which each stage is choreographed; enemies and their projectiles come at you and overlap with each other with a frightening level of grace and fury and the action does not stop until the end-of-stage scorecard. Blue Wish Desire is fast, it's tight, and it does not wait. It's a non-stop adrenaline rush from start to end, and I cannot get enough of it. And the music, oh, the music. Especially the Stage 1 music. It's sublime, and it'll get your heart racing for the action.
Blue Wish Desire also offers four difficulty levels to cater to a wide range of player skill; Heaven (Easy) and Original (Normal) are the two starting difficulties, with Hell and Accel being unlocked after a 1CC in Original and Hell respectively. Hell has much tighter bullet patterns than Original, and Accel follows the same bullet patterns as Original but at twice the speed. Yeah. Blue Wish Desire in Accel has got to be some of the most insane fun I've ever had in any STG.
As things stand, Blue Wish Desire isn't exactly what you'd call a pedestrian-paced shmup. Dial the difficulty up to Accel and you'll be laughing like an absolute maniac. It's completely nuts. If Boost Mode in Crimzon Clover is your cup of tea, then you'll absolutely love Accel.
And finally: while you'll only be presented with two ships to choose from when you first launch the game, there are an additional three which you can unlock after clearing the game with the two starting ships. And if you manage to 1CC the game in each of the four difficulty levels for a given ship, you'll unlock a gold variant which disables bombs but grants permanent-hyper which despite what you may think actually makes the game harder as being cornered without bombs results in a swift and inevitable death.
Yeah. Pair a gold ship with Accel though and you'll be screaming your lungs out. Again, it really reminds me of Boost Mode in Crimzon Clover. You may not get your clear, but oh boy will it be the most amount of deranged fun you'll ever have in an STG.
What a masterpiece. Buy it!~
(P.S. Yep, this is my grand idea of a short review @_@!!!~)
<3

This is a really cool bullet hell for fans of the genre. The developer has been around for a while, and they really understand how to make interesting bullet patterns. The visuals aren't my favorite style, but the stage layouts and boss patterns definitely make up for it. Really, some of these boss patterns are among the best in the genre.
In terms of difficulty, the game is pretty forgiving. In fact, I'd say Blue Wish Desire is a solid choice for bullet hell beginners. For more advanced players, there's a promising scoring system - but keep in mind that there are times when a death can be devastating to your score potential.
You might have heard that this developer also has some other free games which aren't on Steam. But in my opinion, Blue Wish Desire is their strongest game and the best one to start with. It's definitely worth full price. Buy it for the cool bullet patterns!

Love the soundtrack, and the ship design. I would love to spend more time with this game when not learning other shooting games in the future.
Looking forward to Eden's Eclipse from xxgameroom.

This is an excellent excellent shmup clearly made with love and experience in the genre. If I had to be reductive I'd say it's Cave-esque, with the mechanics and design sensibilities of CV1000 games like Mushi/DFK with the game feel of PGM games like Ketsui and DOJ.
Played half on the Steam Deck where it works perfectly fine. Just get a layout that maps the keyboard (I have one posted, but I see others).
It's classic arcade shmup fare through and through. Highlights:
- 5 no-BS stages, with midboss and multi-phase end boss in every stage. Stage 1 starts fast, so no DDP stage 1 snoozefest. Stages are good and feature land and air enemies that make sense with the stage background.
- Excellent bullet visibility, though enemy visibility could udebabvut if eirk
- Multiple difficulties, multiple ships, and toggleable generous auto-bomb. Original difficulty is manageable and easier than DFK 1-ALL with a strong type ship. Haven't tried hell.
- Cave-style buttons (like DFK): fire, autofire, bomb, hyper.
- Hyper cancels every bullet, grants you a short amount of invulnerability, and makes killing enemies cancel bullets close to them, important for scoring.
- Support for tate mod, fast resets, and has a training mode.
If you're a fan of the bullet hell subgenre or enjoy PGM-era Cave games, you can't go wrong with this game.
Some cons:
- Graphics are what they are. I find they are okay though nothing spectacular. Clarity is good enough.
- Dying is brutal scoring-wise because it sets your chip count to 0, ouch.
- Replays can desync. Trying to see if there's a reason for this.

Fantastic shot em up