I return to the Polarimetic Dance - Senko no Ronde DUO

So I just realized that I spent all of yesterday and this morning playing around with Senko no Ronde DUO, and this was my reaction when I noticed the sun was rising on the window:

Here's what I discovered after playing the game for a bit:
- The disc art and main menu presentation are ugly. You can see what the main menu looks like at the 50 second mark here.
- You don't need to have your main weapon fully reloaded in order to execute command moves now, so it's possible to cancel your main weapon attack animation into whatever special move you were trying to execute. That's pretty neato.
- In Senko no Ronde classic, there was a bug with both Lili and Sakurako where if they did something specific while dashing (Lili using the Twin Tails and Sakurako using her Barrage), they can still watari dash, but they would still be facing the direction they were dashing to when they used it. G.Rev decided this was an interesting bug since this is a "new" feature for the dash mechanics in DUO. Essentially, if the player fires their main weapon, they can choose to do a few things: dash cancel, watari dash (which kind of behaves like the bug I mentioned in classic), fire their sub weapon, and/or barrage or use their close combat attacks. Now like with Capcom's Marvel vs Series, the attack string needs to go in a particular order if you want to execute all of these attacks during a dash. Essentially, it goes like this:

Dash > Main Weapon > Watari Dash > Sub Weapon > Barrage/CC attack

This little change right here makes the game more interesting because, well, more options to execute generates more possibilities. For example, you could force the opponent to dash in a particular direction by firing your main weapon and then Watari Dash your Rounder to meet right where they're going to be and then nail them with the new CC move which is almost universally a 360 degree melee strike that generates knockback if it's a clean hit.
- Originally, the home port to this game was supposed to be released last month, but they had to delay it until now because the netcode wasn't up to par. I've tried a few matches, and it definitely is a lot better than Rev. X's. Of course, playing offline is still oodles better, but I don't mind playing online now since at least a bad connection generates lots of slowdown instead of Warcraft III-like latency.
- And speaking of online, the lobby system is much better. You can choose which player you want to have a match with instead of the game randomly choosing someone for you. It also lets you know if there's nobody available online and will kick you back to the previous menu.
- Oh, and replays. You can save up to 40 of them on one storage device. And then upload them for others to download. I would've raged if this wasn't part of the game.

There's more I'd like to say, but I think I kind of accidentally committed myself to continuing the article for the game series on the main website, so I'll keep my mouth shut for now unless it's something more technical and would probably bore people to death if I mentioned it there.