Hi,

First and foremost: I'm convinced that this game has the potential to be really awesome.

Unfortunately my first gameplay experience in the tutorial was ... less than stellar. I'll try to break my main complaints down while they're still fresh on my mind:

- At least per default the sound effects are somewhat too loud compared to the voiced tutorial instructions.
- The voiced tutorial instructions in Japanese referred to gamepad buttons and sticks. I was playing with keyboard and mouse at that time and the written instructions were referring to keyboard and mouse as well. Since there was no "replay last instruction" and the written instructions rolled on without me confirming anything this was really confusing.
- The interface shows a lot of stuff that's not explained in the tutorial.
- Especially the second tutorial map with the one bullet-spongy mech and the four towers attacking my team was really stressful. Either I missed important stuff (like min and max range of some weapons and how to estimate whether I'm in range for something, what weapons are good against what, what the bazillion bars at the bottom of the screen actually mean etc.) and with the enemies shooting at me and the techno soundtrack hammering in the background ... instead if me learning more about the game the second tutorial map was merely stress and trial & error ... but because all prompts disappear really fast and enemies shooting at me really motivated me to just push buttons that stressful second map actually did not allow me to learn more about the game.
- By the time I had gotten through that map I just wanted to find an in-game encyclopedia to read up on what I could not during the tutorial mission. The management menu tutorial however told me that I need to improve my team ... and since I didn't even know what my team can do and what my team lacks and what any attribute or bar or gauge means ... I didn't really feel like being hustled through the next badly explained thing right away and took a break ... to write this post.

As I've said: I'm convinced that the game has a lot to offer and will eventually be really enjoyable ... and I'll probably understand how it works at some point, but my first experience with the two tutorial maps was really pretty stressful and confusing and they still took me 0.7 hours to play through... mostly because on the second map I just performed trial & error actions against a bullet sponge on wheels. Needless to say: It wasn't all that enjoyable and mostly felt like wasted time. After tutorial map #1 reading a well written, classical PDF manual would have been more productive than what map #2 delivered.