At first I tried playing Cthulhu's Angels on Insane difficulty, but that quickly grew too tedious for me. I restarted on Hard difficulty, which was a decent enough challenge most of the time. I finished that Hard playthrough over the span of two days, and while I enjoyed the new experience, the original mode just felt...better. 

Cthulhu's Angels was a nice change; I enjoyed building up the four new characters and discovering all the weird changes. But I enjoyed my original playthrough more. The characters were more interesting and more plentiful (and Cthulhu was one of them. In the original game I usually stuck with Cthulhu, Sharpe (a living sword), Paws (an alien cyborg cat), and October (a necromancer/mage girl). 

In Cthulhu's Angels, October is the main character (though her skills are different), but you're stuck with Elona, a healer/buffer girl, Umi, a sword-wielding girl, and Molly, a werezompire (but basically just another agile warrior-type girl). That's it, aside from a secret unlockable character late in the game. Otherwise, there is no opportunity to switch out characters, or discover and try new Unite skills. 

The new characters do have some interesting skills between them. Three characters have access to "damage every turn" skills (and Elona actually has two). Umi has a spell that drains her health to deal damage, while Molly has a spell that deals more damage when her health is high. October has a variety of damage spells, and Elona gets access to pretty much every healing spell and either single-target or group buffs/debuffs. But the characters themselves are still rather uninteresting, at least compared to some of the characters in the original mode. 

The new plot points, dialog, and bosses in Cthulhu's Angels often feel gratuitously weird. I'm not sure that is necessarily a bad thing, but the original mode seemed much more focused on poking fun at genre tropes. Cthulhu's Angels still has some of that, but the parody can get too absurd and start to feel forced.

Nothing in Cthulhu's Angels bothered me enough to stop me from playing all the way to the end, and having fun doing it. If I were judging Cthulhu's Angels independently of the original mode, I would probably have much less to criticize. The gameplay is still solid all the way through, the bosses are still challenging, the leveling system is still simple but interesting, and the humor is still everywhere. If you enjoyed Cthulhu Saves the World the first time through, I have no doubt you'll still enjoy Cthulhu's Angels. Just...maybe not as much. But the only way to find out is to play through yourself.

I should also mention that I played through Cthulhu's Angels with the developer commentary option enabled for the first time. The commentary is presented via small question marks placed throughout the game environments that can be read. The commentary is mostly standard information, looking behind-the-scenes, detailing content that was cut or changed pre-release, revealing inspirations, and explaining game design decisions. Unsurprisingly, there is usually some humor in most of the commentary nodes. There were some odd moments when the commentary referred to something from the normal mode which no longer existed in Cthulhu's Angels, but that's not a big issue.

I still have to try the Boss Attack (gain points for fighting bosses while under-level) and Highlander (only one character at a time) modes, but I'll probably be putting those off for a bit. I don't want to get too burned out on Cthulhu, and there are other games to play. But Cthulhu Saves the World is one of the few recent games which can run on my netbook...so I might end up trying those modes sooner than I think.