After playing a few Steam games that weren’t all that great, I decided to take a break from Steam by playing a game I thought I’d like (and that I thought would be short and quick), but I had to give up finishing.
This is a horizontal shmup, but rather than have stages with fixed scrolling and reliable enemy placement, stages loop and enemy waves spawn based not on where you are, but on how much time has passed. You can even change which direction you’re moving, which also changes which side of the screen enemies spawn from (even mid-enemy-wave). Because of this, there isn’t really any fixed level design outside of the locations of the ten enemy spawners in each level (and the enemies they spawn are different from the ones that appear in waves over time). As more spawners are destroyed, enemy waves appear quicker (and in later stages, shoot faster bullets). Once all ten enemy spawners are destroyed, the scrolling becomes fixed, enemies stop spawning, and the boss appears. For controls: on top of your standard shot (which actually shoots two thin, parallel shots), you can drop a bomb; only one can be on screen at a time, but rather than having a large destruction range like in other shmups, it’s just a tiny projectile that moves with your own momentum and barely does any more damage than your standard attack, so it’s hard to aim and rarely useful. Your standard shot doesn’t have rapid fire, either (you have to hit the button for each shot, and each spawner takes several shots to be destroyed), so look forward to your thumb hurting after almost every round.
One of the first things you’ll notice is that, despite the game being 2D, its camera is a strong contender for the worst game camera of all time. First of all, keep in mind that even if you’re not holding a direction, you still move forward, along with the camera; holding forward just makes you move forward faster (you can stop completely if you move to the bottom of the stage, but I rarely found this to be useful). However, holding forward doesn’t cause the camera to move with you; instead you have to keep holding forward until you get near the other edge of the screen, at which point the camera slowly pans back into position and follows at your speed (and if you let go of forward at any point, the camera goes back to its slow speed and you have to start the process over). Either that, or you have to stop holding forward entirely and hope that your slower speed can avoid the enemies while you wait for the camera to go back into position. This isn’t even the worst part: the camera tries to keep you on the side so that you can see more in the direction you’re facing, but when you combine its slow panning with the fact that enemies spawn from the direction you face, it’s easy to see how you might try to move backward to avoid enemy fire, only for another wave to spawn a mere 2-3 units away from you and kill you before you can react. Honestly, this makes the first few levels way more difficult than their respective bosses in comparison. Why not just keep the camera centered (except during boss fights)? That probably would have been easier to code, too.
On to the rest of the game: in the first round, none of the enemies fire projectiles, so naturally, in the second round (where projectiles are first introduced to the player), there are foreground objects to obscure them. To make things worse, the enemies themselves (including the larger-than-average enemy spawners) are also drawn in front of projectiles, which is an issue that plagues the whole game instead of just one or two levels. It makes the third stage quite a bit easier in comparison, despite the boss being a bit more difficult. The fourth round is even easier still, with all the enemy spawners being on the ground, thus letting you actually stop and shoot them without worrying about running into them (and if enemy waves shoot at you, you can just move a couple units forward). It’s so weird seeing an older game have such a backwards difficulty progression (difficulty curves are normally something they do better than modern games); it would have clearly been better if round 2 and 4 swapped positions and bosses.
Speaking of bosses, the first three are fairly light on projectiles: the first one only shoots them in a cone shape, the second one just has a smattering of projectiles rain down occasionally, and the third shoots lasers (though they get faster when the boss gets low on health, even getting to the point where bombs are actually useful since you can’t really get between them, shoot, and get out fast enough). The fourth and fifth boss are closer to traditional shmup bosses, shooting lots of projectiles consistently, though they also have multiple weak points that need to be taken out. The fifth boss is a little unintuitive since you have to take out all of the front ones before the next set are vulnerable, even though you can clearly hit them with your shots (and they can shoot you) before then. The sixth boss takes things in a different direction: rather than have any projectiles at all, it has six hazard walls that rotate around the center, so you have to keep circling around the boss’s weak point with them to avoid dying. However, rather than speeding up as the boss loses health, said hazard walls speed up over time. It’s sort of a reverse Dynamic Difficulty: rather than get harder the better you do, it gets harder the worse you do. Plus, they also give barely any opening to shoot the weak point (it’s so thin, only one bullet from each of your twin shots can make it through), and it also spawns from the left side of the screen rather than the right like all other bosses, so expect to die a few times before you beat it.
However, as devious as the sixth boss is, the seventh boss is the worst part of the game. It starts off innocent enough: it’ll split apart and fly into the camera, then try to reform on top of you, at which point it pauses, letting you counterattack, then it repeats its pattern. Also, just like the round six boss, it gets faster; the problem is that it gets so fast, it eventually surpasses your own speed, making this boss literally impossible…at least, unless you buy a speed-up item from the shop. However, keep in mind that 1) none of the rest of the game requires a shop upgrade, 2) the shop only appears at the beginning of the level and when you’re around halfway done, 3) you can only change your equipment right after exiting a shop, 4) the speed-up items make it harder to dodge enemies and projectiles, and 5) the first two speed-up items STILL aren’t fast enough! On top of all this, since speeding up its pattern is all the boss does, it’s really easy once you have a fast enough speed-up item, so this boss really only exists as a trial-and-error quarter-muncher. No wonder arcades are dying out.
Oh, and did I mention that none of the levels have checkpoints? If you get hit a single time, even against a boss, you’re sent back to the beginning of the whole level.
On a more positive note, this version of the game has four extra levels that aren’t in any other version (not even the other PS2 version), which is three more than the X68000’s measly one extra level that isn’t in any other version. While its hard to say the levels have…really any level design due to the nature of enemy waves, the bosses here are some of the best in the whole game. The new rounds are placed between the final two rounds from the original game, pushing the former round 8 to round 12. The boss of the new round 8 is a totem tower: the top shoots guided bullets, and the other four segments slide large hazards back and forth, with the weak points being behind said hazards. When a weak point on a totem segment is destroyed, its respective hazard disappears, but the top segment shoots projectiles more frequently. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but on top of the usual “hazards hide bullets” issue, this boss also has a reverse-Dynamic-Difficulty thing going on where if you take too long, the boss moves forward and the hazard movements get more erratic, giving you less room to maneuver (especially if you started from the bottom and went up). When all the weak points are destroyed, the main tower disappears and the head moves up and down, shooting at you, and if you get in front of it, it charges forward. Despite its issues, it’s a much better fit to follow the round 6 boss than what we actually got.
Round 9 is the only other round to put all of the spawners at the bottom, and as a result, creates another sudden drop in difficulty, despite the fact that this stage is the only other one besides round 2 that has foreground objects. The boss, on the other hand, is still a drop in difficulty compared to the previous three, but only gets harder in relation to its health going down, which is a nice change of pace. It’s a circle with 8 turrets around it and four shields that cover every other one; the uncovered ones fire, then the shields move one turret to the side, then the pattern repeats; as more turrets are destroyed, the remaining ones shoot bullets that split into more projectiles.
Round 10 is fairly unique because it has a diagonally-moving enemy that ignores the camera’s scrolling, instead just sliding across the screen. All previous enemies that ignored the stage’s scrolling kept to the margins, so far away that if you tried to run into them, the camera would readjust itself, but for these enemies, the awkward camera just makes it even harder to dodge them. The boss is a weak spot surrounded by rotating, fragmented circles; while the circles themselves won’t hurt you (they’ll just push you out of the way), there are hazards orbiting between them, and they’ll still block your shots, so you have to weave toward the center to hit the weak point (which is itself surrouned by a rotating shield, but the gap is significantly larger than the one for round 6’s boss).
While round 10 still isn’t as difficult as round 8, round 11 is even less so; while it has a camera-ignoring enemy that moves across the screen, this one will stop and move vertically for a bit first, giving the player more time to kill them before anything crazy happens. The boss is also easier: while it starts near the camera and tries to run at you like the stage 7 boss, this one is reliably avoidable without power-ups, so it also shoots some projectiles from the bottom of the screen before moving up itself, which isn’t much harder than the round 2 boss. Plus, when it gets low on health, it gets easier since it stops attacking and just slowly chases you; maybe I just encountered a glitch?
The final round is a departure from the rest of the game since there’s only one shop encounter (at the very beginning) and also no enemy waves; instead, it’s just a gauntlet of all the previous bosses. However, these versions of the bosses are different than their original counterparts, shooting more bullets and moving faster. Normally, I’d appreciate the fact that these aren’t total rehashes of earlier bosses like I’ve seen in other games, but unfortunately, the round 7 boss is among them, once again being impossible without a speed-up item, but now you need the absolute fastest speed-up item to avoid it. Not only does this make all of the other projectile-based bosses unfeasible, but this round also includes the new bosses once you’ve beaten the old ones, starting with the round 8 boss (which is hard enough even when you’re in control of yourself). Needless to say, this is the part where I gave up.
So yeah, I would not recommend this game. There’s a good game buried in here (or at least an okay game), but the awkward camera and the round 7 boss ruin much of what could have made the game fun. You’d think with this being a remaster and all, they’d go back and fix the game’s major issues, but I guess not. If you’re still set on playing it, here’s my recommended stage order:
1.Plaleaf
4.Doli Micca
3.La Dune
2.Tabas
5.Polaria
9.Apochal
11.Depooble
10.Cavian
6.Mockstar
8.Dawndusk
7.Pocarius
12.Salfar
P.S. The “rapid” fire upgrade is a lie; it only shoots, like, twice per second, making it even less useful than bombs. If you think it will save your thumbs, you’re sorely mistaken.