I learned to speedrun this game when it originally came out on the Nintendo Switch, and have quite a few hours there. Google "Tanuki Justice Speedrun" and you can see the video there on SRC. I submitted this to GDQ 2021 and hopefully if it's accepted, will run it this year. It's a very fun, obscure platformer, and if you're into speedrunning at all - the speedrun is great. In fact, the entire game actually is clearly built (based on the achievements) around speedrunning in mind.
This game is really good and the port is also very good from the Switch original. It's a kind of run & gunner platformer with partial bullet hell mixed in. There's very little RNG to deal with so beating the game will eventually involve memorizing enemy spawns and execution. You can expect probably a 2-3 hour casual playthrough on normal. The harder difficulty levels are actually quite insane. They increase enemy spawns/bosses, some level layouts and difficulty exponentially.
The mechanics are really simple: you have an 8 way shot (and there's some confusion if you read the discussions about a feature called "lock position") but, it works as intended. Locking your position doesn't and isn't supposed to make you stand in one spot a la Contra 3, but it instead "locks" the last directional input you pressed - so it's entirely possible to be facing left, lock your position, run forward right while shooting behind you. This actually is a really good mechanic and makes carrying your forward momentum through stages or doing certain sections very useful buffering it in advance.
There's a neat design choice where if you pause the game, your high score stops recording, which I like and am a fan of. Any score attack/difficulty achievements can't be cheased this way and just paused through.
You have a shuriken you can upgrade through treasure chests that extends your range and a shield that allows you to take one extra hit (which the game is OHKO otherwise). There's a bomb meter where the more enemies you kill/damage you do, it fills up, and once the bomb meter is full you can release it. If at any point you die, you lose your shield, bomb meter (and bomb if it's stored) and upgraded shuriken and everything is reset back down to the minimal starting point. It's punishing.
Overall, this game is good and I would especially grab it on sale. I tried to find a lot of bugs and glitches and there's one softlock present in the PC port that was in the Switch original. If you scroll the screen after getting to the waterfall in stage 3 up a bit, walk back left to the first rock and walk off of it, the game softlocks. There is partial controller support and I play(ed) this with a PS4 controller fine mapped via Steam Big Picture as a XBOX 360 controller.
My one BIG issue, and only issue, is this game can't be windowed. IF you don't have a second display, this is extremely annoying when it comes to streaming and interacting with chat. If you don't stream at all or don't care, then this is really a non-issue. I absolutely wish this game could be windowed.
Overall probably a 8/10 for me. Game is short, but the game is also good. It's even better if you approach it as a speedrun. Despite this review, I might keep my hours low and refund it. I bought it to support the developer on PC after originally buying it on Switch, but the lack of window mode makes it almost useless to me as my current setup is a 1 monitor setup ($5000~ PC/rig setup) and I don't plan to change that anytime soon.
