It's out! Quick impressions:

- The biggest change is that the Metroidvania stage design seems to be gone. Each rainbow drop appears to be in its own unique stage, rather than a few dozen of them spread out in each large area. So far, it's very linear, though it's still early on. Every stage also has its own puzzle piece to find, and I assume many of them require replaying the stage with abilities acquired in later chapters.

- There is now a ranking system that grades you on how many droplets you acquired and how quickly you reached the rainbow drop. It's not too tough to get the full five stars, but I do think it could be a source of frustration later on.

- The visuals have a bit more "life" to them. Background elements move around a lot, little captions tell bits of story, the puddle and rainbow drops are lively little characters now.

- Tilting the system isn't as bad as I expected, but it still feels pretty awkward. Especially when you have to tilt it upside down. This is restricted to certain stages, though: it's about a 50/50 split so far.

- Gathering for too long now reduces your health. Maybe I'll get the gather-splode later on, but I used Gather a lot to corral straggling droplets, and I kind of miss doing so with less risk. Oh well.


Overall, pretty solid so far. It's a lot like the WiiWare original 30 minutes in, but with improvements in some areas and questionable changes in others. Anyone else get it yet?

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