Now with an unofficial translation, this wacky time traveling robo-maid adventure is here! It's a bit of a clunky game, with aggressive lock on firing, a melee attack that requires you to be standing completely still, and a dodge counter that feels pretty unintuitive, but you can probably clear the game in under a couple hours so it doesn't overstay its welcome. There's also a fair amount of variety; among its eight stages there's a sniper level, and an on-rails level to break things up. You'd expect a clunky action game to be difficult but weirdly most of the game's enemies feel like they can't do anything to you until the final boss, and there's a reason for this, which I'll get into in a little bit.
The dodge counter system is very strange. You need to press the triangle button right as an enemy's attack reaches you, and if successful, the maid will do a pirouette. If you quickly press square as she's spinning, she'll warp to the attacker, whip out a submachine gun and autofire at her target. Thing is, if you press triangle in any other situation, it does nothing at all so you might not even be aware it has a use. This is a game where you absolutely should look over the manual that comes bundled with the English patch because the game will not explain anything to you!
So you've dodged with triangle, and countered with square, cool. You took no damage but actually the reason you want to do this is that the submachine gun doesn't cost bullets to fire, allowing you to conserve ammo. Remaining ammunition is one of the ways the game grades your score, so if you want to afford even a single upgrade over the course of the entire game you'll need to get used to it quickly.
Waiting around for an enemy to attack so you can save ammo sounds annoying, but they kinda have you covered with this ridiculous ability mapped to R3 called Maid Style, which makes you taunt the enemies (?) letting you mash triangle during the animation in hopes that you'll pull off a dodge. The amount of successful Maid Style dodges you pull off in a level also contributes to your score. According to the manual, you need to do five in a level to S rank that category.
So I think that the general difficulty of the game is so low because they expect you to learn how to dodge counter aggressively, meaning lots of missed inputs, taking lots of hits from enemies. The side effect of it being so easy though is that I just kinda plowed through most levels with the sword attacks, occasionally shooting trickier enemies. I could not afford a single upgrade, nor did I unlock anything, but the biggest drawback is not being prepared for the final boss.
It's three fights back to back and by now they really expect you to know the dodge counter. The difficulty spike is real. Now, the dodge counter isn't the difference between a good score and a bad one. You won't have enough ammo to beat these fights, and I don't think the clunky sword is gonna bail you out of that problem. My strategy was to conserve ammo on phase one, be a bit more liberal on phase two, and spam the L2+R2 bazooka special move for all it's worth in phase three.
Overall it's a neat little game. I think its brevity makes it an easy enough recommendation even if there are far better action games out there. It has a miraculously self-contained time travel plot and no filler at all. The patch was created by Hilltop and his team, and you can find it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74280694