this that shit travis touchdown plays
Decent enough shmup, it's interesting how it plays a bit more like ikari warriors or commando or whatever where you as the player are in control of the levels scrolling instead of being stuck on a potentially-long-winded auto scroll of your typical shooter. The game being more of a twin-stick shooter def helps perpetuate that kinda vibe, and the whole curse system is pretty neat. Instead of having your typical bomb or alt shot, you get to shoot out a curse which can cause some effect to happen on an enemy like slowing it down or changing its bullet patterns or what have you. You can also curse yourself for a major attack buff and frankly I pretty much relied on the self-buffs more than anything else to get through the game. There's your typical mission and arcade modes for the challenge-seeking shmupper as well as a story mode with voiced cutscenes and a few unique gameplay gimmicks. For the story mode lives are done by character which means you can only have a maximum of 5 lives and the game saves which characters are alive when you continue so it can be very easy to accidentally screw yourself by barely beating a boss with your last guy only to be stuck on an even harder level with only one life. The story mode also loops over and over until you fulfill two requirements per level, usually defeating all of a certain enemy and defeating the level boss as a specific character, but the game doesn't tell you any of that whatsoever so good fucking luck figuring out that shit especially when levels have branching paths that you can't backtrack down where your objective might actually be. Luckily the game is still pretty benign when it comes to difficulty with only the Karakuri Castle being a sudden kick in the balls, so it's honestly not too bad of a beginner shmup on the standard medium difficulty if you just wanna try and do a story mode run. If you are a danmaku junkie then there's still plenty to enjoy with the challenge setlists (which for some reason are in a horizontal aspect ratio despite the arcade and story modes being in the typical vertical shmup aspect ratio which is strange.) The OST also bangs (when you can hear it over the constant shooting, explosions, and anime noises), so that's pretty cool too. Overall a solid enjoyable time.
Decent enough shmup, it's interesting how it plays a bit more like ikari warriors or commando or whatever where you as the player are in control of the levels scrolling instead of being stuck on a potentially-long-winded auto scroll of your typical shooter. The game being more of a twin-stick shooter def helps perpetuate that kinda vibe, and the whole curse system is pretty neat. Instead of having your typical bomb or alt shot, you get to shoot out a curse which can cause some effect to happen on an enemy like slowing it down or changing its bullet patterns or what have you. You can also curse yourself for a major attack buff and frankly I pretty much relied on the self-buffs more than anything else to get through the game. There's your typical mission and arcade modes for the challenge-seeking shmupper as well as a story mode with voiced cutscenes and a few unique gameplay gimmicks. For the story mode lives are done by character which means you can only have a maximum of 5 lives and the game saves which characters are alive when you continue so it can be very easy to accidentally screw yourself by barely beating a boss with your last guy only to be stuck on an even harder level with only one life. The story mode also loops over and over until you fulfill two requirements per level, usually defeating all of a certain enemy and defeating the level boss as a specific character, but the game doesn't tell you any of that whatsoever so good fucking luck figuring out that shit especially when levels have branching paths that you can't backtrack down where your objective might actually be. Luckily the game is still pretty benign when it comes to difficulty with only the Karakuri Castle being a sudden kick in the balls, so it's honestly not too bad of a beginner shmup on the standard medium difficulty if you just wanna try and do a story mode run. If you are a danmaku junkie then there's still plenty to enjoy with the challenge setlists (which for some reason are in a horizontal aspect ratio despite the arcade and story modes being in the typical vertical shmup aspect ratio which is strange.) The OST also bangs (when you can hear it over the constant shooting, explosions, and anime noises), so that's pretty cool too. Overall a solid enjoyable time.