Gun Bullet Children is bad in almost every respect. It lays the exact blueprint for how to not make a bullet hell game. This game is as conventional a japanese bullet hell game as they come, but the devs took few a quite terrible misstep when it comes to the art design and several game mechanics.

First and foremost this game is a very poor localization effort to bring it to the Western audience. The only thing in the entire game that is english is the menu screen, everything else is in Japanese including the voice acting. There are no translation subtitles. The music, while mediocre generic nonsense is nonetheless appropriate for this game because it too is generic nonsense.

The developers who appear to be creatively bankrupt also appears to have also completely lost their ability to properly use color on their art in GBC. The game bullets are a heavy shade of red and the hud text is also red. I can handle really big sky and beat hazard level of crazy colors, but GBC’s ridiculous color theme hurt my eyes after a while.

To further add to the ugliness, the games bullet looks like they were designed in MS paint, every single bullet looks extremely low quality. The fact that there are only two different shapes for bullets in a bullet hell games makes me wonder what on earth the developers were doing with their art asset.The bullet coloring and design problem is magnified further in the game’s bullet pattern sequences. There are many sequences where the bullets are just thrown on the screen with no rhyme or reason; the screen just becomes one huge blob of red. It also doesn’t help that the game has unresponsive controls. Side strafing is alright, but vertical movement is frustrating to control.

For a game that was made many years after many iterations of the epic touhou series, you’d think the developers would know how to make GBC as aesthetically pleasing and playable as possible.. This is the worse of the exceed series, and in my opinion the worse bullet hell game on steam.

The first game in the eXceed is a straight Japanese import version, which means it has no english dialogue, for neither text nor voice
There's also no resolution settings or windowed mode option, so it always runs at a small resolution but full screen
If you have to choose one of the games from the series to buy, i'd not recommend this, pick up 2nd or 3rd instead

Didn't get my $0.74 cents worth

eXceed isn't a terrible game, but it is an entirely inessential one. It gets the fundamentals of a bullet hell game right but does nothing unique to distinguish itself, and with so many other similar, better games to choose from (including two superior sequels) I'm at a loss to come up with any reason to spend time with it. The overly compressed graphics and audio, and the inability to save or continue a previous game also cause it to feel particularly dated and archaic, presuming you actually manage to make it work.

I can't exactly call it broken, but eXceed has major problems running on modern computers. For reasons I'm still unclear about it's virtually impossible to get the originally intended 60fps on anything but ancient hardware, and with the speed of the game directly tied to the frame rate less than that is functionally like playing in slow motion. With enemies and bullets moving at a snails pace the action changes from fun and challenging to downright boring. I'm not joking when I say I had more trouble keeping myself awake than completing the first three levels, at which point I just couldn't take it anymore.

Outside of for free I wouldn't recommend eXceed, and even then only to those with an old computer lying around to play it on. Everyone else can skip straight to the sequels and not miss anything, as the original is now little more than a placeholder.

To all the fan out there who like Anime, I would only Recommend this game to you if you have the patience and skill to play this game, the first part to the trilogy is very difficult to understand as it's all in Algerba, and the controls are very hard to use, I say this as if you press ctrl then for some reason the game restart and takes you back to the main menu, whither that's my config or not still would ♥♥♥♥ you off. overall the game play is ok but very hard to control as iut's all about dogding and shoot like space invaders, but at a more advance level.

with only 3 continues it makes it the perfect challenge for those who want to test there reactions and hand-eye cooridnation. but in my opinon I'm hoping that the other two are alot more better then this one as I was very disappointed with this game.

if anything I'd give this game a 4/10 - only because you tend to get bored of it quite quickly even if you are an anime fan lol