If you're looking for a Cave game to import, get Mushi first. Espgaluda 2 is a fantastic game, but it's VERY difficult, and substantially harder than the first game. I wouldn't recommend it to beginners, but it's definitely worth picking up when you get more used to the genre.
most importantly, Brian Ashcraft seems to be very into Cave and shooting games. So I'm very confident it will indeed be region free. I mean, they are directly quoting Makoto Asada after all.
No no no, do not believe this at all. Ashcraft pretends to be a lover of obscure Japanese games, but his articles are almost always full of misinformation and would give the impression that he's never actually played them. He does it to get "hardcore cred" on his site.
Ashcraft is not known in any shooting game community, has no accomplishments, and is not very good at them at all. The only way he's known at all in the scene here is when he requests an "exclusive interview" with some of the better players, all for his beloved site. You'll never see him at any major events, location tests, tournaments, etc. People who have witnessed him playing have said that he plays at an extremely basic level. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking the genre and not being very good at them, but he tries his hardest to lead people into knowing what he's talking about.
Best example I can give is when Otomedius first came out here, Ashcraft wrote a ton of articles about the game and how "crazy" it is, look at dem girls! At TGS later that year, he played the 360 port on display and said something like he was glad to finally get a chance to play the game. The game had been out in arcades for the better part of the year, but despite writing plenty of articles about it, he never found it worth his time to actually play the damn game before the port was out. Bloody phony. The shit he writes about other games that he supposedly loves are just as bad (his posts about iDOLM@STER-related things are guaranteed to have inaccuracies).
Unfortunately, the people who do know what they're talking about usually stay within their community, so the greater masses just read Kotaku and believe everything. It's because of sites like them that there's so much misinformation present in the Japanese games scene.
