The joy of blowing things up.
Batsugun marks an inflection point in the history of scrolling shooters. The joys of good ol’ dodging and shooting had been long established in the genre, and Toaplan themselves had done much to further amp up their intensity in games like Dogyuun and V-Five. But Batsugun takes those fundamental pleasures and finds a freshly maximalist lens through which to express them. Batsugun goes BIG. Dozens and dozens of fiery bullets scream down the battlefield while the player hurls just as many back, and when fully powered up the player’s fire can completely blanket the screen. The player’s bomb shocks the eyes with a sea of blue light, destroying anything in sight and providing just a moment to breath and to blink. The extremely charismatic visuals and soundtrack back up the bombast of the gameplay, declaring to anyone who’ll listen with deafening, electric clarity that bullet-hell has arrived.
Part of what makes Batsugun really special though, is not just the scale of the experience but the clear consideration to detail throughout it. Various targeted choices in the game design are made to facilitate this new sort of mayhem. The hitbox of the player’s ship is made smaller than usual for the genre up till now (but not quite small enough!). Players respawn on death right where they died, no checkpoints to have to return to, with powerup items spawned on screen with them to get them back up to proper lethality. There’s even an RPG-inspired leveling system, where as players destroy enemies they earn XP, and each new level represents a new, higher floor for their destructive capabilities, which ensures that a death on stage 5 isn’t the end of a run, just a recoverable setback. Not all of these ideas were new, but Batsugun uses them all in combination with mostly excellent encounter design and bullet patterns to create lightning in a bottle.
The bosses are showstoppers, hulking metal monsters that look like they could take a zillion bullets and then a few more. Of these the most imposing is easily the stage 4 boss, Jupiter, a flying warship that stretches beyond the far edge of the screen. You have to creep up its bulk steadily, dodging curtains of flak and blasting it apart piece by piece until one or both of you is reduced to a lump of hot metal and cast back down to earth. These bosses showcase that delicious mixture of simultaneous fixed and aimed bullet patterns that would be a staple of future games by CAVE, and there’s an addictive quality to learning to speak their language, reading a pattern and weaving through it on a mixture of knowledge, intuition, and breakneck gumption.
Scoring is both brutal and busted, punishing deaths harshly and requiring a drawn out milking strategy on the aforementioned stage 4 boss, but sticking to survival is more than enough for this one. The later revision Batsugun Special makes a few tweaks to the scoring, shrinks the player hitbox even further, and also grants players a shield that will protect them from a single shot, and which regenerates on every level up. That small cushion of protection is just enough for less skilled players (like myself) to buy in to the apparent brutality of this genre and say to themselves “I can actually do this.” It’s a testament to the talent of the craftsmen at Toaplan that with their final game they not only created a work worthy of their storied history, but also brought to life something so confident and original.
Game absolutely rips. You should play it!
Batsugun marks an inflection point in the history of scrolling shooters. The joys of good ol’ dodging and shooting had been long established in the genre, and Toaplan themselves had done much to further amp up their intensity in games like Dogyuun and V-Five. But Batsugun takes those fundamental pleasures and finds a freshly maximalist lens through which to express them. Batsugun goes BIG. Dozens and dozens of fiery bullets scream down the battlefield while the player hurls just as many back, and when fully powered up the player’s fire can completely blanket the screen. The player’s bomb shocks the eyes with a sea of blue light, destroying anything in sight and providing just a moment to breath and to blink. The extremely charismatic visuals and soundtrack back up the bombast of the gameplay, declaring to anyone who’ll listen with deafening, electric clarity that bullet-hell has arrived.
Part of what makes Batsugun really special though, is not just the scale of the experience but the clear consideration to detail throughout it. Various targeted choices in the game design are made to facilitate this new sort of mayhem. The hitbox of the player’s ship is made smaller than usual for the genre up till now (but not quite small enough!). Players respawn on death right where they died, no checkpoints to have to return to, with powerup items spawned on screen with them to get them back up to proper lethality. There’s even an RPG-inspired leveling system, where as players destroy enemies they earn XP, and each new level represents a new, higher floor for their destructive capabilities, which ensures that a death on stage 5 isn’t the end of a run, just a recoverable setback. Not all of these ideas were new, but Batsugun uses them all in combination with mostly excellent encounter design and bullet patterns to create lightning in a bottle.
The bosses are showstoppers, hulking metal monsters that look like they could take a zillion bullets and then a few more. Of these the most imposing is easily the stage 4 boss, Jupiter, a flying warship that stretches beyond the far edge of the screen. You have to creep up its bulk steadily, dodging curtains of flak and blasting it apart piece by piece until one or both of you is reduced to a lump of hot metal and cast back down to earth. These bosses showcase that delicious mixture of simultaneous fixed and aimed bullet patterns that would be a staple of future games by CAVE, and there’s an addictive quality to learning to speak their language, reading a pattern and weaving through it on a mixture of knowledge, intuition, and breakneck gumption.
Scoring is both brutal and busted, punishing deaths harshly and requiring a drawn out milking strategy on the aforementioned stage 4 boss, but sticking to survival is more than enough for this one. The later revision Batsugun Special makes a few tweaks to the scoring, shrinks the player hitbox even further, and also grants players a shield that will protect them from a single shot, and which regenerates on every level up. That small cushion of protection is just enough for less skilled players (like myself) to buy in to the apparent brutality of this genre and say to themselves “I can actually do this.” It’s a testament to the talent of the craftsmen at Toaplan that with their final game they not only created a work worthy of their storied history, but also brought to life something so confident and original.
Game absolutely rips. You should play it!