I've been giving the game more time, and it does have its moments and cool gameplay features, but ultimately it's too getting too frustrating for me to enjoy.
I did get past the Stage 9 boss finally; I made it through a few more stages and am now stuck on the
boss of Stage 12. Watching that youtube video, I don't see myself having the ability to pull of those kinds of moves. It's hard to avoid his attacks because the boat you're fighting on is so small, and it's quite unstable if you're trying to jump over his claw swings. Plus, you have so little breathing room between each swing!
The clunky weapon switching in this game is such a big hindrance to an otherwise solid control scheme. You rarely have a break in the action to go straight to the weapon you want to select. I understand Treasure not wanting to make the weapon switch pause the action on the screen so that it adds to the tension, but considering how quickly your weapons run out of juice before they need 'recharging' means you'll be switching very often, and it seems they could have done a better job of implementing that.
Anyway, I'm scrolling though the list of stages I have finished and have left to do, and there are 25 stages... I'm so far away from ever completing this game unless I want to pour hours into my skills and techniques...
It's tough when you're trying to select your weapon set from the 8 offered to you. You take 4 with you, die, then mix it up a bit to see if something works better, and try again. Then when you finally complete another stage, you're likely to die again, then you have to experiment with your weapons sets all over again. It can be tiring.
I may put this one in the 'give up' pile for the time being...