As much as I hate to throw Alice under the bus, I have been wanting to get into the Ijiatsu 'verse, and if Rou needs another partner, I'm there.
I'm considering, then, for Rou A to have something like a snake option to emulate Shou's curvy lasers. Does that make sense?
Oh, this gives me a good idea. I was thinking of something along the lines of UFO SanaeA (my favorite UFO shot type, and snakey to boot), or maybe PCB SakuyaB, but maybe we can come up with something that borrows from both:
Suppose that initially, I shoot out curvy lasers that go back and forth enough to cover a straight vertical column in front of Rou. Moving unfocused to the left causes the leftward oscillation of the lasers to become more exaggerated compared to their rightward oscillation, and vice versa for unfocused motion to the right. Focusing locks in the lasers' properties, like with PCB SakuyaB. The result of this should be that at close range, the lasers are hitting stuff directly in front of Rou, but as they get further away, their net motion curves more and more in one direction.
How's that for batshit?
Regarding other shot gimmicks, I fully support doing away with a ReimuA style flawless homing attack, but some sort of partial homing shot type (like PCB Sakuya A) might be cool to have available. I'm also wary of having any shot type's gimmick be purely score-related, as most players are probably going to ignore score in a game where it doesn't directly net you extra lives.