Full disclosure: a few years ago I was exactly the person who’d blasted through this on freeplay, then dutifully nodded to myself, “this is the best shmup ever made,” and then proceeded to never play anything else in the genre.

I don’t know if getting a 9CC admonishes me of that, but it’s certainly forced me to see the game in ways I never had before. And I totally get why it grates on people: it’s setpiece-heavy, memorization-intensive, and each of the five stages pulls in wildly different directions- sometimes an intense bullet-hell, sometimes an infuriatingly slow crawl through the box factory.

And the scoring system! Every screen ends up being this order of operations puzzle to chain every trio of colors as quickly and precisely as possible- miss a few and you’ll lock yourself out of the chance to spawn extra groups of enemies. All this is to say, it can be maddening for the first few hours as you get a feel for the rhythm of the game, trying to keep in step with the rigid dance of the whole thing.

The feature that made me really start to love the game was the way you can play levels without firing a shot, what the game calls “Dot Eater.” While it’s cool on its own that you can play entirely as pacifist (and a daunting challenge in its own right), it’s the way this feature intersects with standard play that I’ve found really helpful; if you happen to miss one of your targets when trying to complete a combo- you can wait a bit, survive, and then re-enter the fray when you’ve regained your composure. It’s definitely made replaying the levels more enjoyable- of course going for the S++ rank requires near-perfection, but you’re given a little more flexibility as you strive for mastery, stretches where you neatly chain through everything on screen, take a moment to take a breather, and then pick the chain back up.

The bosses themselves also really open up thanks to being scored by time instead of chaining, your strategy evolving as you try to shave off just a few more seconds with each attempt. I thought the first boss, Eboshidori, was a complete slog initially, but go for the best possible time and suddenly the fight is transformed, frantically switching between polarities to get some extra energy and maximize your damage, weaving between attacks that originally seemed so harmless.

I also want to take a second to acknowledge that, with a bit more context, this is probably one of the nichest shmups I’ve played. Credit-feed through something like Dodonpachi and you’ll have a good time blasting through hordes of enemies, and likely leave with a decent sense of what the experience is like. In contrast, so much of enjoying Ikaruga only comes with time; that first playthrough shuffles you right along, no chance to prolong your survival with any sort of i-frame granting bombs or hyper-mode, missing big portions of the game as the bullet patterns reset each time you die, meaning you don’t really have a chance of getting into any sort of flow state. And as mentioned before, this is a very setpiece heavy, memorization intensive game- hard to intuit what parts of the screen are just instant-death or when some boss will materialize behind you on a first playthrough.

But maybe that’s okay, and it’s more a indication of how stellar the aesthetic and thematic qualities are that even those fumbling initial attempts end up feeling so epic- thrown into the climax of a spectacular battle that you know is vital, even if you can’t quite articulate why. Even now, the game’s focus on perseverance in the face of adversity has been strangely reinvigorating for me, a reminder to fight for the good in the world, even if reality itself seems to be pitted against you.

"Is this what we wished for?
Don't worry, we will understand each other some day.
And the life is succeeded into to the distant future."

Maybe I wasn’t totally off when I first played it.