I have to confess to not be a big fan of the original Daioujou. It lacks a lot of the style and appeal the original DDP had for me. Very muted and boring colors, enemies and especially bosses look like glorified trashcans, and it lacks a lot of the imagination found in bullet patterns you see in other Ikeda games like Ketsui and Progear. Even though I'm sure it has more mechanics, it feels dumbed down and especially Black Label with its even longer combo timer doesn't keep me on the edge of my seat like Donpachi and DDP always do.

So someone looked at this and has a brilliant idea. What if we make this game again, on lower quality hardware, and put animes in it. Voila, Saidaioujou. But if I just left it at that, I'm afraid I'd give off an impression that's too positive for what this game actually feels like to play.

This game is unique in that it's the only Ikeda game that just feels really shit to play moment-by-moment. Despite the bullet count only going up from game to game. The hitbox is made bigger, and it just feels worse overall. It's hard to put my finger on it, but deaths often feel unfair to me in a way that doesn't happen in other Cave titles.

The visuals? The whole game looks similar and flat. SDOJ is going for this blue futuristic look with everything having the default Photoshop outer glow effect. Every stage looks the same to me. And the worst crime a shmup can commit? Bad explosion graphics.

The music and sounds? The crunchiest. Part of this is because of the cv1k hardware, but even other cv1k titles like Futari sound better than this. Usually developers get better at this the more familiar they get with the hardware, but somehow this is a big downgrade from Cave's previous titles. It might actually be the worst I've ever heard a game sound.

Scoring? That's fucked up too. Because it's basically impossible to break the chain if you know what you're doing, the goal now is to get that chain number as high as possible. And on stage 3 & 5, you can get the overflow glitch, where if the combo goes up high enough, you get a shitton of points for each additional hit. The world record replay doesn't even have 'splits' for the other stages and focuses on getting the overflow as fast as possible. So the one part I still like about Daioujou has been reduced even further in this game.

So while I personally thought this was a huge disappointment, if you're just here for the bullet patterns and you have an above average tolerance for the animes, it still plays like any other Ikeda game and if that's all your care about, give it a try for sure. But for me I don't think I'll ever play this again, while I can play literally any other Cave title.