To me, Holocure is definitively better than Vampire Survivors, because they aren't in the same genre anymore and ultimately I don't think I like Vampire Survivor's genre. Vampire Survivors is a game where you move around, and you make decisions about moving around, picking up and advancing weapons, items, as you go. Holocure is that but also you have 2 active abilities, Support & Special, and some weapons have attack direction so it's basically a twin stick shooter. This is what makes it Nanaca to me.
Nanaca Crash actually has an absurd amount of nearly impossible to make use of player agency, which moves play into a weird space of fighting to be the player. Vampire Survivor is barely not an idle game, and all of the play space exists in figuring out meta in order to make entertaining decisions in configuring your nearly autonomous character. VS also suffers from a memetic hazard I'm infected with, most videogames can be described as a combination lock. You enter the correct inputs and it gives you the thing.
This is a really frustrating thing in my brain and it's why I don't like puzzles in game design. There are a few basic movement patterns that conditionally synergize with builds in VS and once you identify them with their use you just do that and not doing that is wrong. You do the most right thing you can until it's done, until you have progressed the unlock tree and the meta to the point where it is mathematically possible to achieve your goals and/or the game's goals. In VS this is unlock all the stuff, reveal all the combinatorics, and kill death. Which you do by operating the D-pad to achieve motion patterns and positionality subgoals, selecting from sets of 3 or 4 things periodically along the way.
A lot of the time optimal play in VS is you take the guy you're working on to the library or the tower, depending on if you intend to have primarily vertical or horizontal attack patterns, and the linear nature of the map constrains the enemies to simplify your agency space. In the tower there are trap manholes, don't step on them, or do if you want but it's not relevant so don't want, and there's rooms where big storms of bone serpents spawn, these move too fast and densely to be engaged with agently so just dodge or leave. The library doesn't have that.
One of the big points of inanimate agency in VS is that many maps have weapons and items scattered around that you can go pick up. You can receive weapons and items from levelups until you have the maximum number, which I can't even pull to mind because it's just fact, you don't count them they're just there. You can pick up more than that, but the synthesis of this is you must not pick up anything until you have received the maximum from levelups, or you simply get less. In the same, you can pick up a thing you already have, but that doesn't give you a new thing, it just upgrades and you will get the upgrades, so you must not receive anything from levelup that you could pick up later. Thus, the strategy is to plan for having things you can pick up later, and survive until it is appropriate to pick them up. The simple example being the Library always has the spellbook that lets you evolve the Wand. So you get the Wand, and you do not get the spellbook, until you have filled out all your items so that when you get the spellbook you have more items than you would have otherwise. Which is good.
This gets enhanced with joint evolutions, such as the guns, or the birds, or the whips. The important mechanical addition here is that you have multiple weapons evolving into a single weapon, and usually retaining the essential function of both. So when you evolve the two guns into one set of four guns, you get to get another weapon. Which is good.
This is the essential gameplay of Vampire Survivors. Understand how your weapons interact with the space, and how they tetris together, so that you can get more stuff, because having more stuff makes things go better for you. Now just don't fuck it up.
Yesterday I unlocked a new map in Holocure which is a vertical strip of land between two bodies of water. Positioned in the water are pirate ships. When you move vertically across the plane of a pirate ship, they shoot a big cannonball at you and you die (you only 90% die and then you get killed by the mobs). This map is really aggro, with quite a lot of mobs spawning, they do a lot of damage quickly, and there's a lot of obstructions breaking up the space, I don't think I've broken 5 minutes yet. Part of that is there's an upgrade system, part of that is that the weapon/item synergies are a lot more complicated, part of that is I don't use my special as much as I should. I also think that this map does a pretty great job of punishing girls who aren't suitable for it, which in turn rewards concept mastery of the different play styles and how to augment them with builds. If you just fall into movement patterns, you're going to get crushed by a cannonball.
Did I mention you can't see the pirate ships most of the time? There's an area you need to stay in, or cross between with intention, at least until you get your speed up a lot. It's tight and you must keep your exits open or you're going to get killed.
To be clear this is still a combination lock, but now the definitions of the conditions can't be laid out simply, and the margins on failure are a lot tighter.
Like driving a car, the goals are to get to your destination, not die, not kill anyone, not allow your vehicle to touch any pedestrians, and do so efficiently, which is a combination lock scenario, but moment to moment that doesn't describe what you're doing.