Solid vertical shoot em up with good visuals, music, and for most boss designs. You have a main shot and can pick up a few different kinds of weapons, two kinds of homing shots, a more forward focused shot, and one that shoot out on on the sides. You can also pick up one of two modules, one gives you a bomb to detonate while the other gives you attachments to the ship sides that might shoot based on your weapon and allow you to hold secondary fire for a massive speed boost. Dying resets you at a previous checkpoint where you can usual grab an upgrade again, it's not a huge setback as there are no weapon upgrades, shields, bomb stockpiles, etc. Base enemies can be very easy to get through and once parts on bosses are destroyed their are some that take a ridiculous amount of damage, luckily usually the ones not offering much challenge at the later points of their fights.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1563801838906114048

First of all, Dogyuun is a weird name for a game. Apparently "Dogyuun" is a japanese onomatopoeia for something moving by really fast. It'd be like if a western developer named a game "swoosh" or something.

Dogyuun is one of the later vertically scrolling shoot em ups developed by Toaplan, released in 1992. Toaplan's artist/s and sound team really went in hard with Dogyuun - the sprite art is super detailed and just oozing with cool mecha style throughout. It's not like this is a small tech demo game either. Dogyuun has a close to 40 minute loop spanning 10 stages, which is pretty damn long for an arcade shmup and the quality of the visual setpieces do not drop significantly throughout the whole run. There's also an awesome powerup in the final stage that I suggest you look up yourself.

Unfortunately this hyperfixation on a strong presentation caused the gameplay experience to suffer a bit. Don't get me wrong, Dogyuun is still fun to play and feels surprisingly modern with its weapon system and unique module attachments mechanic, but the game feels a bit... unfinished? Diluted? either way something feels a bit off. Stages repeat the same enemies quite a lot and there's some game breaking bugs, such as a softlock which can occur after defeating the stage 7 boss and a "kill screen" after finishing the 4th loop (the latter should only be an issue for superplayers at least).

Overall Dogyuun is a good (and relatively lengthy) romp but there's a sense that Toaplan flew a bit too close to the sun with this one. I think the overall experience would have been better and more polished if they cut at least a couple of stages to allow more development focus on the gameplay.