My thoughts (mostly from my YouTube video)
Overall I'd say it's middle of the road. Pattern design is pretty nice.
Music and presentation has flashes of greatness but overall lacks energy and I found myself twiddling my figurative thumbs waiting for certain waves to be over more than once during the game. I'd say my favorite tracks are s1, s3 boss, and s5.
The hyper system is most similar to Aspect Shifts from Dream Logical World, except it's separate from bombing. You fill up the gauge by collecting the yellow and red (power) items, and press C to hyper, draining it.
While you hyper, enemies will drop large point items that are 2x the value.
The hyper gauge can fill up to 3x. At 2x, your hitbox becomes smaller, at 3x you can take a hit without dying (which drains your gauge to 0 immediately).
It's pretty difficult to keep your hyper sustained because power items aren't nearly enough to keep the gauge up, you have to rely on the yellow items which are only sparsely dropped by large enemies.
Graze doesn't do anything to my knowledge. PIV is only raised by collecting yellow items.
Overall I didn't find the system that interesting to engage with, and the lv3 shield thing actually discourages survival players from ever using the system (unless you want a brief screen clear or something). After playing Abyss Soul Lotus which is designed around all players having to use the system, survival or scoring, I'm less lenient on games that try to bifurcate their playerbase into the scorers and the survivalists. It's possible to design a good system for both.
Not clear what the story is about yet as I haven't read in depth, but it's based on ancient Chinese mythology (like, 200 BCE sort of ancient).
