Solid, entertaining, great controls – Mushihimesama BUG PANIC Review

This dual-stick bomb-based game is a bit like Smash TV meets a top-down NES adventure game, with a healthy dose of bullet hell thrown in. The retro graphics are good, the characters and cutscenes are cute, the game is rather long and entertaining, heck, it even has a full (and catchy, if silly) peppy J-pop theme song. Best of all, the controls feel GREAT--extremely responsive and perfectly suited to the touchscreen. It's one of the few virtual-stick games I've played that I didn't feel like I was fighting the virtual controls. There's really only two things to complain about: One, there really isn't that much of a story (about what you'd expect from a NES-era action-adventure, which is to say limited entirely to short cutscenes between levels). And two, paths and alternate, hidden paths on levels are triggered by killing every bug in an area, but some bugs only reveal themselves when you step on certain spots and then only after killing some other bugs, so getting 100% completion requires a LOT of wandering around poking at corners randomly. I'm all for hidden bits, but it doesn't feel like there's any rhyme or reason to it--more slog of aimless prodding than satisfying.
Review by Makosuke on Mushihimesama BUG PANIC.