cave games have been my ultimate come to since the beginning of this year lol
dodonpachis ost is amazing and shines through (black label ost even better), the numerous modes you can play with give it some variety while, no matter what ship you selected, stage 5 will be the death of you. the shooting patterns are nice, the story is pretty decent for a shmup giving this game some depth as to why the game is restarting over and over from the start. overall i think this is really one of the peak cave games :)

A gameplay loop is a concept that permeates thorought every game that has ever been made. WIth the constant sense of progression that exists as more hours of one's lives are spent in the endless march to read the end of a work, you inherently get used to this loop. It may be something erroneously simple or something vehemently more complex to sift through, but the process of finishing a game requires this loop to become second nature. In this sense, these shoot-em-up games are the idea of a gameplay loop solidified into a pure game. You don't "finish" a shoot-em-up. Of course, you could; you can create an arbitrary goal for you or consider it a done deal when you reach the final stage. You can make that goal a 1cc, so on and so forth, but that doesn't solidify "finishing" them. As you reach the ending you create for yourself, there is always a higher ceiling to reach. Thus the only thing that really creates an ending is yourself and your own mentality.

DoDonPachi Resurrection is this very idea of an infinite gameplay loop, seamlessly sewn together with an actual loop with its story. In the fires of its creation, what molds its sense of self is that very relationship between a gameplay loop and an actual loop. As a very, very, very quick summary of its plot, DoDonPachi Resurrection has you, as the pilot, go back in time to stop a war in the future, caused by a rogue AI. However, the real plot kicks in by the end: in the process of attempting to stop this, you yourself have caused the events that lead up to your leap through time. At the end of the game?

"Perhaps the future cannot be changed."

Of course, that's not all that DoDonPachi Resurrection offers. There are multiple modes, multiple ships, an entire second loop if you are good enough to get through a run with the strict requirements it needs to access it. There's Arrange modes, Black Label (best soundtrack), so on and so forth. But despite the amount of modes, the options, how good you are, how far you get, you can never really change the past.

Thus, DoDonPachi Resurrection never ends. You simply constantly go through this same loop, no matter what, constantly. It is a loop of bullets, of organized chaos, and the continuos dance between it all. DoDonPachi Resurrection is a rondo on loop, even if the steps are different, the dance forever starts as it ends.