This one was hard to 'grade' because this game frustrated me at points. Don't get me wrong, ExcessM's stuff is nothing short of stunning, and this game builds upon the foundations laid by SMASHBOY beautifully, with 10+ weapon variations, more mechanics, several status effects, and slightly better keyboard controls (seriously, how the hell are you meant to play this with a mouse is beyond me).
The game looks amazing, the animations are great, the visual and audio feedback works wonders. The music is just ok and the story honestly surprised me. I could believe that these are real characters, not one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs of tropes (not all of them at any rate).
So where did this game frustrate me? On its idea of difficulty.
The developer has gone the Dark Souls 2 route of difficulty, where instead of giving you enemies with feints, different attack patterns, dodging on their own, counter attacks or any other interesting mechanic like that, they just deal a truckload of damage in a single hit, or they swarm and stunlock you.
Being a veteran of basically every other ExcessM game, I started this one on Hard. I can't confirm this, but I think the dodge window in Hard is reduced by a wide margin from Normal. I just couldn't get past one of the first few screens in the game in Hard: The normal enemies were hit sponges and the dodge window was so small and they hit so hard that a single mistimed dodge was my demise.
In Normal this game is way more enjoyable, even though it gets pathetically easy near the end, especially if you nail down the Katana's parry timing. I'll probably try a NG+ run in Hard and see if that was the intended progression.
Oh yeah, and the lewds are A++ but one can't expect less from this circle.
In conclusion: Beautiful game, with deep mechanics and great lewd content, but disappointing in its wonky difficulty and enemies that don't explore the game's own mechanics to use against you. Still very much worth a try as it is several hours of fun for free.