I like the strategic elements you discussed.ДЄll I got to add is make sure the players don't dread the slow down of going to town. Zelda meets Ikaruga? Sounds like you have something there. During this loading time your actions would be restricted, for example the player gets slower, cannot shoot, or must not be hit. Those would use up a lot of MP and would need some 'loading time' before they are actually executed. For example if the enemies are really fast and shoot predominately red bullets you might take with you slowdown spells and armor with high defense against red bullets.ДЄlso there could be very strong screen filling spells akin to the summonings in final fantasy and golden sun games. So based on the enemies you encounter in the next dungeons you will decide which items are the most appropriate before leaving a town. To not make it too easy you can only carry a limited amount of items with you. Or a spell can make an enemy temporarily slower or the player faster. 'Spells' use up magic points and can have different effects.ДЇor example a Defense Spell can give you for a short time span very high defense against a certain color. Also each armor item has a specific defense against each color, for example an item can have strong defense against red and green but only average defense against blue. Each color is particularly effective against another and less so against the others. Weapons have different colors, say red,green and blue. In shops you can by weapons, armor and 'spells'.

Those fights aren't whole shootemup levels but are rather like short boss fights. Towns feature shops and people who you can talk to and who will give you tasks.Дungeons are rather regular shoot em up levels.ДЄlso on the overworld there might be (semi)random fights.

There's a typical RPG overworld with 'towns' and 'dungeons'.

Here are actually some elements I've thought of: I wanted to do something like this once too before I realized it was a bad idea. If you just want to do the whole JRPG overworld thing combined with an entirely separate bunch of regular shooting sections inbetween w/out any stat-building cruft then I guess that might be alright, but it'd probably feel really annoying to have to sit through minutes of Character Developmentв„ў and filler puzzles to get to the interesting portions of the game. It doesn't help that most games which try to do this also have awful level design and lots of INEEERRTIAAAA (though Silvergun didn't.) It isn't fun to always have to play for score or else later bosses take forever to kill. The closest I know of is Radiant Silvergun, which has a score-based EXP system for weapons, and even then that system was easily the worst part of the game and mostly what made it (at least, to me) just a good game instead of a great one. Yeah, it's been tried to varying degrees many times in the past, and no one's managed to make a great game out of it.

Shoot em up