Trouble Witches Final! Episode 01: Daughters of Amalgam (Switch 2) Review

A cult arcade witch shoot ’em up finds its best broom yet

Trouble Witches started life in 2007 as a niche horizontal bullet hell in Japanese arcades, a strange mix of cutesy magical girls, dense curtains of bullets, and an on-stage shop button that stopped the action to let you splurge mid-boss. It picked up a small but dedicated following on PC and 360, but it never felt like it had the horsepower or the visibility to really shine.

On Switch 2, Trouble Witches Final! Episode 01 finally feels like the game it always wanted to be. This is still a very traditional, very old-school shooter at heart, but the upgraded hardware, cleaner visuals and added content make this the definitive way to experience Studio Siesta’s bizarre little broom ride.

The shop system: chaos by way of capitalism

The defining mechanic here is the shop. Enemies drop coins rather than the usual shower of medals. At almost any point during a stage you can fly into a shop gate and freeze the action while a tiny witch clerk offers you a spread of cards, each representing a temporary spell or powered-up familiar.

That core idea is intact from the 2007 arcade board, but on Switch 2 the pacing feels more deliberate and readable. The original’s shops were notorious for breaking the flow in an awkward way: the game would lurch into a cramped menu while the CRT hummed behind you, then spit you back into a mess of bullets. Here the transitions are more instantaneous and the interface sharper, which matters when you are dropping in and out of the action multiple times per stage.

The Switch 2 version also does a better job surfacing what you actually want to buy. Item descriptions are clearer, icons are higher resolution, and the default cursor position intelligently nudges you toward a build rather than a random grab bag of spells. Coins are still plentiful, especially if you play aggressively and hug enemy waves, but it feels less like you are drowning in pointless currency and more like you are planning routes around shop usage.

Most importantly, the shop is still a risk-reward engine. Ducking into a gate just before a mid-boss wave is incredibly powerful if you know exactly which card you want. Fumble the purchase or hesitate on the menu and you will warp back into a pattern that has already started without you. Trouble Witches has always rewarded course planning over pure twitch reactions, and this port preserves that by keeping shop interruptions snappy but consequential.

Difficulty curve: kinder on-ramp, same vicious ceiling

Trouble Witches Final opens with a surprisingly gentle first loop. Hitboxes are small, bullet speed ramps up smoothly, and the generous stock of bombs and shields in the early stages makes it feel almost approachable.

Compared to the original arcade revision, the Switch 2 balancing has clearly been tuned to help new players survive long enough to see what the shop system can do. Bullet density in the first two stages is lower than in the 2007 board, and coin drops are slightly more forgiving when you are powered down. The game wants you to learn how to convert coins into survival tools, not slam you into a credit wall at stage two.

The second half of the game, and especially higher difficulty modes, are another story entirely. This is still a bullet hell where mismanaging a single shop visit can effectively ruin a run. Later bosses in Hard and above regain the arcade original’s cruelty, layering wide, slow spreads with sneaky needle patterns that push you into the corners. The shield system allows you to tank a bit of chip damage, but once you are out of resources there is very little mercy.

Where Switch 2 really changes the experience is consistency. The arcade board and older console ports could choke when the screen filled with coins, enemies, familiars and player shots. Those brief dips were enough to throw off muscle memory and make already tight patterns feel unfair. On Nintendo’s new hardware, the frame rate is far more solid even in the nastiest sections, so deaths feel like your fault rather than the machine’s.

New content versus the 2007 arcade original

If you are coming from the original release, Trouble Witches Final is more than a straight port. This is the culmination of the later PC and console reworks, folded together and cleaned up.

Multiple playable witches are unlocked from the start, each with distinct shot types and bomb behavior. The 2007 version already had variety here, but the Switch 2 release smooths out balance bugs and gives weaker characters slightly more coin efficiency and survivability. Some of the later-arriving characters from past updates, which used to feel like novelties for advanced players only, are better integrated into the story and scoring systems.

There are additional modes and quality-of-life options absent from the arcade original. Practice mode lets you drill specific stages and boss phases, crucial in a game where shop timings matter as much as raw dodging skill. Online leaderboards, a proper replay system, and more flexible difficulty sliders turn what was a one-credit-at-a-time arcade experience into something you can seriously grind.

Visually, the art has been retouched without losing the aggressively cute, slightly messy doujin charm. Sprites are sharper, backgrounds less muddy, and bullet patterns a bit easier to parse thanks to cleaner color contrast. It is still clearly a mid-2000s design in terms of layout and animation, but it no longer looks like it is fighting against the display it is running on.

Performance and scaling on Switch 2

Nintendo’s newer hardware does Trouble Witches a lot of favors. The game targets 60 frames per second and, in practice, holds it almost all the time. The two places older versions struggled were heavy coin fountains and screen-filling boss attacks. On Switch 2 those moments remain visually extravagant but the performance hit is dramatically reduced.

The higher-resolution output is handled smartly. Original assets were never meant for ultra-high resolutions, yet the scaling on Switch 2 is clean enough that edges do not shimmer and bullets remain clear even in handheld mode. Backgrounds can look a bit flat if you blow the image up on a huge TV, but the important information enemy sprites, bullets, coins and shop gates reads well at a glance.

Input latency is another quiet improvement. Using the system’s standard controller, movement feels snappier than on previous console ports, which is critical when your hitbox is a handful of pixels navigating overlapping bullet curtains. If you have a decent d-pad or arcade stick, the game responds quickly enough that weaving through point-blank patterns feels natural rather than like you are fighting sluggish polling.

Load times between stages and when entering or exiting shops are very short. That may sound minor, but in a game built around repeatedly throwing yourself at the same patterns and shop timings, getting back into the action quickly keeps the loop addictive instead of frustrating.

Verdict

Trouble Witches Final! Episode 01: Daughters of Amalgam on Switch 2 is not a reinvention of the genre, and it certainly will not convert anyone who bounces off dense bullet curtains and sugary anime art. What it does do is finally give a cult 2007 arcade oddity the stability, clarity and feature set it always deserved.

The shop-centric design remains one of the more interesting twists in horizontal shooters, turning resource management into as much of a challenge as dodging. The difficulty curve is more welcoming without sacrificing the vicious upper end that score chasers crave, and the performance on Nintendo’s new hardware keeps the focus squarely on player skill.

If you value tight, expressive shooters and do not mind your death spirals wrapped in pastel witches and frantic capitalism, this is the version of Trouble Witches worth owning.