Something that attracts me to this genre is that it’s sort of like Game Design as Album, and it lets the player participate in the songwriting and performance each time. The game has to showcase all its mechanics and systems in as few as 20 curated minutes. That’s a very tight timeline on which to take the player on an entire journey, though like the best records, the best shooters use their limited time to create a very dense and rewarding experience, and invite endless replays to drink it all in.
As an album, DoDonPachi is fierce, loud, progressive, deliciously paced, and so catchy that after practicing it for hours I can sing you the full layouts of entire stages.
You’ve got the graceful refrains in Stage 1, where the game teaches its chaining system by having you continuously sweep all the way across the screen from left to right and back again, like hitting every key on the piano as you clean throngs of enemies off the screen. It’s a wonderful, destructive warmup exercise.
Stage 2 introduces big, tanky enemies and obstacles that take extra time to kill while you deal with the smaller threats at the same time, creating a bass-y drone of suspense. Having to kill different enemies that die at different tempos complicates the composition; to really jam with DoDonPachi you’re gonna have to ride those different grooves simultaneously.
My favorite part of Stage 3 has a feature that DoDonPachi only rarely dabbles in: bullet cancels. As numerous big enemy fighters spawn on screen and unleash a cacophony of bullets, you can destroy the nearby frigates to completely wipe out all the bullets on screen, giving you just a moment’s rest. You don’t want to blast these frigates immediately, you need to wait as long as you can before firing, letting as many bullets rain down at you as you can manage before pulling the trigger and throwing the screen into silence. Here DoDonPachi lets you play the conductor, and as they say, the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do.
The boss of Stage 4 is about making the record skip. There’s a glitch you can trigger where if you survive its initial onslaught, then get its health to within a few pixels of a certain target, you can get it to freeze in place and become a sitting duck. To do so you’ll need impeccable timing as you dodge between and then fire during the rhythm of its twin cannon shots. Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, b-... Bump the table right at the end of the measure and the needle slips, and the boss is helpless, the song of its cannons turned into an interminable rest.
If pulling one over on DoDonPachi and taking control of the song in Stage 4 felt empowering, Stage 5 is hellbent on taking that feeling away. The stage is infamous for a section that throws a sheer curtain of hundreds of enemies and bullets at you for the better part of a minute straight. If other encounters in DoDonPachi bring a prog rock sensibility to the genre, this section is a dive straight into harsh noise. It’s blunt, it’s punishing, it bangs and screams and scrapes at the same note on and on. But if you don’t crumble under the reverberating waves of death hurled at you, you will find a moment of peace on the other side. The boss of the stage has an exploit that allows you to sit in a safe spot right in front of its face. Inside that bubble of tension, the game offers a few breaths of serenity.
The finale occurs across the whole of Stage 6, where DoDonPachi brings to bear every trick, lick, dynamic and instrument it has in an attempt to blow you the hell up. It’s a two-and-a-half minute maximalist concerto and as the star soloist you had goddamn better know your part. Giant high-speed tanks slide onto screen and slam percussive, bunched up globs of bullets your way 40 at a time. Massive metal bees spawn repeatedly from the same spot while you try to deal with everything else, forming a downbeat for you to keep up with lest they have a chance to rev up and overwhelm you. The final boss has an array of deadly patterns it moves through in a set order, a last song-within-a-song for you to master. If you’ve made it this far and can still listen to what DoDonPachi is playing over the sound of your own heartbeat on this last track, you’ll be properly rewarded as all the lights go up, all the pyrotechnics flare, and the boss goes down with one final deafening power chord. Wipe the sweat off your brow, take the earplugs out, show’s over.
Of course, for the very best players, DoDonPachi lets you flip it over for a Side B that runs through all the same songs as before but with even more intensity, and with a special bonus track at the end: “Hibachi.” A true final boss to terrify even the most seasoned STG player, a blistering speed-metal apocalypse that I can only dream of getting good enough to experience live one day.
Like all the best albums, DoDonPachi rewards listening close, spinning it again and again, and picking out new nuances every time. It’s an impeccable journey, a delicately balanced and focused project, and a badass jam.
As an album, DoDonPachi is fierce, loud, progressive, deliciously paced, and so catchy that after practicing it for hours I can sing you the full layouts of entire stages.
You’ve got the graceful refrains in Stage 1, where the game teaches its chaining system by having you continuously sweep all the way across the screen from left to right and back again, like hitting every key on the piano as you clean throngs of enemies off the screen. It’s a wonderful, destructive warmup exercise.
Stage 2 introduces big, tanky enemies and obstacles that take extra time to kill while you deal with the smaller threats at the same time, creating a bass-y drone of suspense. Having to kill different enemies that die at different tempos complicates the composition; to really jam with DoDonPachi you’re gonna have to ride those different grooves simultaneously.
My favorite part of Stage 3 has a feature that DoDonPachi only rarely dabbles in: bullet cancels. As numerous big enemy fighters spawn on screen and unleash a cacophony of bullets, you can destroy the nearby frigates to completely wipe out all the bullets on screen, giving you just a moment’s rest. You don’t want to blast these frigates immediately, you need to wait as long as you can before firing, letting as many bullets rain down at you as you can manage before pulling the trigger and throwing the screen into silence. Here DoDonPachi lets you play the conductor, and as they say, the notes you don’t play are just as important as the ones you do.
The boss of Stage 4 is about making the record skip. There’s a glitch you can trigger where if you survive its initial onslaught, then get its health to within a few pixels of a certain target, you can get it to freeze in place and become a sitting duck. To do so you’ll need impeccable timing as you dodge between and then fire during the rhythm of its twin cannon shots. Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, b-... Bump the table right at the end of the measure and the needle slips, and the boss is helpless, the song of its cannons turned into an interminable rest.
If pulling one over on DoDonPachi and taking control of the song in Stage 4 felt empowering, Stage 5 is hellbent on taking that feeling away. The stage is infamous for a section that throws a sheer curtain of hundreds of enemies and bullets at you for the better part of a minute straight. If other encounters in DoDonPachi bring a prog rock sensibility to the genre, this section is a dive straight into harsh noise. It’s blunt, it’s punishing, it bangs and screams and scrapes at the same note on and on. But if you don’t crumble under the reverberating waves of death hurled at you, you will find a moment of peace on the other side. The boss of the stage has an exploit that allows you to sit in a safe spot right in front of its face. Inside that bubble of tension, the game offers a few breaths of serenity.
The finale occurs across the whole of Stage 6, where DoDonPachi brings to bear every trick, lick, dynamic and instrument it has in an attempt to blow you the hell up. It’s a two-and-a-half minute maximalist concerto and as the star soloist you had goddamn better know your part. Giant high-speed tanks slide onto screen and slam percussive, bunched up globs of bullets your way 40 at a time. Massive metal bees spawn repeatedly from the same spot while you try to deal with everything else, forming a downbeat for you to keep up with lest they have a chance to rev up and overwhelm you. The final boss has an array of deadly patterns it moves through in a set order, a last song-within-a-song for you to master. If you’ve made it this far and can still listen to what DoDonPachi is playing over the sound of your own heartbeat on this last track, you’ll be properly rewarded as all the lights go up, all the pyrotechnics flare, and the boss goes down with one final deafening power chord. Wipe the sweat off your brow, take the earplugs out, show’s over.
Of course, for the very best players, DoDonPachi lets you flip it over for a Side B that runs through all the same songs as before but with even more intensity, and with a special bonus track at the end: “Hibachi.” A true final boss to terrify even the most seasoned STG player, a blistering speed-metal apocalypse that I can only dream of getting good enough to experience live one day.
Like all the best albums, DoDonPachi rewards listening close, spinning it again and again, and picking out new nuances every time. It’s an impeccable journey, a delicately balanced and focused project, and a badass jam.