Fun campy anime 3d shooter bullet hell type thing (?) by Grasshopper Manufacture and Level 5. I think it would be fair to call this game the flagship of the Guild series, as to my knowledge it was the first released, and has the very well known Suda 51 and his team behind it. You play as Shoko, who after the death of her father, the president of Japan, gets elected as President and has to get on a flying mecha to liberate Japan from an opressive totalitarian government that is totally not China. It's all very dumb, and during the game itself that is just about everything you learn via a couple of admittedly well done anime cutscenes and the briefings between each mission. All the lore is hidden away in the gallery, which you unlock by doing random things while playing. The game is fucking ridiculous, but it takes its dumb story very seriously, and the resulting tone was pretty enjoyable. Though maybe hearing Shoko ramble on about Japan being beautiful would have gotten tiring on a longer game. There is only 5 stages here and beating them back to back took me less than two hours in normal difficulty. There is decent replay value in getting better scores, playing on hard difficulty, and unlocking all the stuff in the gallery, at least. The gameplay was nice, but kinda lacking variety. All 5 stages work the same, you need to destroy 3 identical towers to open the way to the stage boss, with random objectives peppered in between, usually destroy X of something. Bosses aside, you fight the same enemies every stage, and their tactics never evolve. There is also a single extra weapon you unlock by starting the second stage. No kind of upgrade system, no more powers or weapons. Two kinds of gun and a screen clearing attack that takes a while to charge is all you're getting. At least the game has a rather interesting gimmick in that your shield is also your ammo. Charging attacks depletes your shield but it recharges quickly when not aiming, but while you're doing it you are pretty vulnerable. Receiving damage makes you effectively weaker, so you have to be pretty aggressive. In theory, at least. In normal difficulty, regular enemies are pretty much a non threat, I don't think I ever got damaged by the slow ass tiny lasers enemies piss out, and the only thing that can deal decent damage to you outside of bosses is missiles, and those are fairly easy to counter with your own homing missiles. Bosses can fuck you up pretty fast if you are not careful, but the attack patterns aren't too complicated. I ended up not dying once during my playthrough, and I'm definitely inclined to replay this game at some point on hard, normal was too easy to really make the potential fun of the combat system show through. I wish more games did something similar, too. The shields as ammo thing is a very cool idea I want to see expanded on. Graphics are kinda muddy, but fair enough. A lot of 3ds games look like that. Seeing how short this game is, I really tried hard to play as much of it as I could with the 3d on. Whoever was the absolute genius that decided that having a gimmick that required holding a fucking portable console in place does not deserve to ever make consoles again. I was constantly having to fiddle with the system cause even moving it a tiny bit would mess up the 3d effect. And even when it was presumably working as intended, I didn't get any advantage and it wasn't very impressive. If anything, it bafflingly made it harder to judge distance in a particular boss fight, and made me take a laser to the face I feel like I would not have without the dumb ass 3d. I eventually gave up and played the final stage on 2d like god intended. The game does not have many tracks, just one per stage and boss. But all of them are pretty all right, especially the bosses. Those tend to slap hard. While overall having some nice qualities, the game is pretty barebones. It is an 8 dollar budget title, but even then I dunno if it has enough stuff to justify that price. What is here is definitely good, at least.