ItsumoKnight

A general guide on the game demo: You should set your locale to Japanese. The game opens in fullscreen (no windowed mode yet). Use arrow keys to move, Z/Enter to confirm, X/Backspace to cancel and Esc for Start. Aside from arrow keys, there are only 4 buttons in-game; Z/Enter to dash (referred to as Graze), X/Backspace to attack, C to bomb and Esc to Pause. There is no built-in gamepad detection so you'll need to rig it yourself. Be aware when using in-game binding that there are only 4 buttons: the equivalent buttons to ☐ is dash, ✕ is attack, ◯ is bomb and Pause is Esc. These are atypical controls so I do recommend customizing them. Currently only Reimu is playable, immediately enters a boss fight without any tutorial. You have 5 lives (only the first 3 of which can double as bombs), an oil percentage (which I'm still unsure as to exactly what it does) that is probably a debuff that fades over time, and a stamina meter (spent by dashing and attacking, regens quickly when on the ground doing neither). There is no jump button so your only means of upward movement are attacking and dashing in a direction. Attacking and dashing defenst against enemy danmaku but not their charge physical attacks. Holding a direction while attacking does change the attack (in midair it does shoot danmaku but only at a 45 degree angle downward). The Dash/Graze is charge-based. Reimu's bomb uses 1 of the first 3 lives and releases 8 orbs that deal 3 damage each but it can be cancelled by the enemy if they hit you before you cast it. Marisa and Kogasa have 2 phases, Yuugi has 3. If you do enough consecutive damage during their non-final spells you can knock them down for a bit. In-between retries, do not spam the attack button because that's the cancel command. And give it a few seconds before pressing confirm because the game can bug out if you go back in too quickly and/or if you make too many moves during the first spell. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following are opinions. Bombing's not worth it since it draws from the same resource as lives. You can only launch danmaku at a 45 degree angle in midair so it's also unreliable in exchange for draining stamina unnecessarily. Basically, danmaku is currently useless and melee is the way to go. Keep dashes to short bursts and close to the ground unless you're setting up a slam attack. Upward & downward melee will give you enough DPS to carry you through almost all of the demo; the up-down combo generally destroys the first phase of bosses. The point of the game is to efficiently manage your stamina and engagements, using attack/dash invulnerability to simultaneously avoid getting hit and spam melee on the boss. The hardest phases are Kogasa's 2nd and Yuugi's 3rd. Kogasa keeps jumping to the right corner until the end of the stage where she goes left, so getting into melee range is a little trickier. Yuugi slams the ground a couple of times, making danmaku waves. The first wave won't reach you if you go to the stage ends but after that there's so much danmaku it's hard to keep up invulnerability. The trick is to go into her 3rd phase with as many lives as you can, dash in and spam DPS when she's stopped slamming, and never be under her when she's midair. DPS and figuring out spell patterns does feel nice, but danmaku's been nerfed to high hell (haha) and movement's still unsatisfying. The restraints on danmaku and flight are jarring and I absolutely hate the lack of a jump button. Bombing's useless since you have a vulnerability period before you get it off and you could use that life for doing more melee DPS instead. In my opinion, not a very good demo.

From what I can gather, it seems like you need to do each update sequentially. I came to that conclusion from the "099_101" patch being much bigger than any of the other files, meaning each patch has content the others do not cover. So after setting up the game from "gsw_setup_v099.exe" you'll need to go through each patch starting from the earliest date to the latest (as of this post, that would be "gsw_update_100_106"). The first patch in particular will take a while to detect and patch the game files, so I suggest doing something else in the meantime. Latest content patches here: http://www.sanbondo.net/gsw/download.html