Devil Survivor’s number one goal is to make the player feel like they’re playing something cool. It has this aesthetic I haven’t seen in many other games which I continually referred to as “trashy anime” while playing - it’s so over the top, so stupid, so edgy, that it actually tips the scale back to being kind of amazing. I love the main character’s stupid fucking cat headphones, I love Naoya’s weird-ass cloak. I sincerely regret not recruiting the playable Black Frost, and I love that there’s even an option to use a demon as a main party member. There's only so far this charm can go before it dissipates, though. I found the heavy sexualization of the women in the game who are overwhelmingly minors to be disgusting, though. Devil Survivor’s writing reeks of misogyny - the most present woman in the game, Yuzu (a character who I’m sure capital g Gamers were very Normal about in 2009) spends most of the game either whining about wanting to go home, or fawning over the protagonist. At first, I enjoyed Yuzu’s trepidation towards the whole act of demon summoning. I found it to be somewhat realistic to how someone might react in a similar situation in real life, but it became clear over the course of the narrative that Yuzu was not going to get any big character moments throughout the story to grow. Her ending is pretty insultingly bad, in my opinion. A complete waste of a potentially interesting character.

Generally, I found the writing in Devil Survivor to be kinda hit or miss. They do a good job framing the narrative with interesting plot devices like the Death Clocks and Laplace Mail, but the game’s pacing removes all the interesting tension that those devices could create. This game’s midsection, especially days three four and five, are dreadfully boring, with little of note happening aside from the boss fights. The player just kind of aimlessly wanders around Tokyo, talking to random NPCs to pass the time and lock in their alignment. Devil Survivor’s pace in general is just far too slow - I hate being that guy who needs a speed up button to play RPGs, but without a speed-up button I seriously don’t think I would’ve been able to finish this game. Though, when the writing hits, it hits. I love how they handled routes in this game - there are no routes that felt objectively bad (aside from Yuzu’s), and I appreciate that the game lets you select which route you want instead of just thrusting you into whichever one your alignment score matches up with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t salvage any of the game’s pacing problems, but at least after slogging through painfully slow and unfun battles you’re rewarded with something cool sometimes.

Before I get into the gameplay, I should note that I played through Devil Survivor using a strength build. According to the few fourteen-year-old GameFAQs threads I read about this game, this is the shittier build compared to magic. It definitely tainted some of my experience. I did the Naoya route as my first (and probably only) playthrough, and two out of three of my party members going into the endgame were using physical skills, those being Atsuro and Kaido. With my MC taking all the good physical skills and Naoya gorging himself on literally all of my magic based skills, I was left with Kaido taking all the non-preferred physical skills and poor Atsuro being forced to use support magic, something he’s not very good at. I ended up kind of loving this team aesthetically, but it was miserable to slog through the seventh day with just the main character, Naoya, and what essentially amounted to dead weight.

Most SMT games require little to no grinding thanks to demon fusion - all you really need are three demons that are around the player character’s level. Swapping out demons for boss fights is easy because you only need to create three demons at most. This entire approach is lost in Devil Survivor because the player is deploying eight individual demons in every battle. Deceptively, this causes the game’s most frustrating problem: in order to create stronger demons, you’ll usually be fusing demons from your rotation of eight. When you create a new demon, odds are you will then need to fill a vacant slot on a character’s team. Mind you, there’s no Compendium in the DS version of this game, which drastically changes the way the player interacts with fusion. Any demon that you’ve leveled is essentially lost forever if you fuse it away. You can fuse the demon again, but you’ll have to re-level it to relearn all of its skills. So, you must use the Demon Auction system to bolster your roster for fusion. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if demons weren’t so expensive, but in the late game, demons become absurdly expensive and thus necessitate grinding Free Battles to be able to afford them. Not only that, but Free Battle grinding is further necessitated for cracking skills and leveling your team for the many absurd late-game spikes in difficulty.

Speaking of difficulty spikes, the spikes in Devil Survivor are pretty egregious. Having to run a boss rush of all the previous Bel demons into the final boss was stupid. It didn’t feel like my tactics were being challenged in any way, it was just abusing the game’s imbalance (Drain + Holy Dance) until I finally won. In general, I strongly disliked that Devil Survivor was an SPRG, but my only experience in the genre is from Fire Emblem so I don’t really feel qualified to critique Devil Survivor’s implementation of the genre. The SMT-styled battles were pretty good, but nothing special.

Devil Survivor is like mainline SMT’s less cool younger brother who can do Tech Deck tricks - it's neat, but ultimately nothing of real value.

Killer on Debt

Suda51's Killer is Dead was one of the many titles produced during the "Dark Era" of Grasshopper Manufactured as a developer since they're not publishers themselves. The 7th gen on consoles and the craze of action games, no matter the type was an age to learn the in and outs of the market. Say; your Bayonnetas, Devil May Cries, your Metal Gear Revengeances and even No More Heroes, something more close to home. Each one adding their own flair and substance beyond just connecting combos; the story, characters, dialogue, style, music and the overall presentation helps a lot of these titles stand on their own in top of being Hack and Slash games.

What doesn't suit me much with Killer is Dead is the overall package itself. The consistency in a game is key, maintaining a structure that can last is hard. Specially when we're talking about videogames. Killer is Dead greatest sin is that it can't mantain it at all, and when it does is you start to notice that something is missing. This leads me to believe that: Development time was tight and not enough, it was too ambitious and due to a lack of funding a lot of stuff had to be cut or simple inexperience led to a subpart product.

Takes some light inspiration from No More Heroes combat, combined with a simple yet fun upgrade system and killer7 signature cell-shading style and even the word "killer" slapped on the title. The combat is really fun albeit braindead easy and can get really repetitive on longer sections that require you to fight endless hordes of faceless enemies. It emphazises a "counter and strike" playstyle towards the normal enemies and being agressive towards some bosses; either dodge or parry their attacks to squeeze more juice out of the combat. When it comes to style, Killer is Dead is one hell of a looker, we don't see many games if any with the style that originated in killer7 emphasizing the crude and raw colors over the scenery, specially the blacks disguised as overly thick shadows. Killer is Dead has some of that, but it failed to secure a peaceful cohesion with all of the visual flare it has to offer. It is very close but they might have gone overboard with the motion blur and glow in general? While killer7 remained mostly calm and gave you enough time to analyze the scenery in your head without any intrusive post-processing effect while on gameplay. It is distracting in Killer is Dead if we compare it directly to killer7, it unecessarily stains an already clean image and thus ruining some of the merit it might had towards the future at least for me.

This time we the take control of "Mondo Zappa" and no it's not Sumio Mondo's lost cousin or anything just because they share that word. "Mondo" means "World" in Italian and my guess is because both characters travel around the world very often due to their jobs. Zappa works under an agency sustained by taxes, which means they work for the goverment, and their main goal is to execute whoever the client at hand is asking. Each chapter is treated as missions or levels which can be selected on a world map alongside sitting with some side-content in top of it alá No More Heroes 2. "Giggolo" as they're called are basically side-missions were we need...to enchant women with gifts? The whole ordeal is unnecessary, used as an excuse to give us new gadgets to make combat/exploration easier. It might be one of the many corporate meddling decisions that Grasshopper wered force to include because it really feels out of place and not something even a teenager would like. Lame.

Back to the story itself. It is known by most people that Suda51 makes games for a specific type of audience, they're not for everybody and that is perfectly okay. The weird and outlandish style can both attract and discourage people to try these games. Most Suda51's work tend to be chaotic on the surface, but subtle on the inside; Killer is Dead is vague and tries to tell it's whole narrative in that style. You see, killer7 worked because it has a fundation to stand on and the details of the story while vague were presented correctly as it had a lot to tell and was complex even for it's time. Killer is Dead narrative is quite simple but burried under layers and layers of vague dialogue and shiny visuals that end up confusing more than answering the questions themselves. That is why Killer is Dead fails for the most part and it is why I feel indifferent towards it.

Killer is Dead is worse that the sum of it's part. On one side it is a good and stylish action game, on the other side the music and the story are quite underwhealing and doesn't do much to shine on it's own so I barely had any reason to go forward outside just wanting to finish it. Play it if you're in the mood but don't feel forced to do so, it's 2$ on Steam on most sales.

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "Marx loves you. Do you believe in Marx?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Socialist or an Anarchist?" He said, "A Socialist." I said, "Me too! Democratic Socialist or actual Communist?" He said, "Actual Communist." I said, "Me too! What school?" He said, "Marxism." I said, "Me too! Revolutionary Marxism or Reformist Marxism?" He said, "Revolutionary Marxism." I said, "Me too! Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism or Revolutionary Marxism-Trotskyism?"

He said, "Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism." I said, "Me too! Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, or Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Hoxhaism?" He said, "Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Maoism." I said, "Me too! Regular Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Maoism or Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought?" He said, "Revolutionary Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought." I said, "Die liberal!" And I pushed him over.

I excitedly began playing this on November 15th, 2019, the day it released. It started out fun enough — the beginning is cinematic, has some nice music and pretty locations... Exploring the Wild Area was novel and enjoyable for me at the time. I spent a lot of time there, actually, squeezing every bit of enjoyment I could out of that place; camping with my Pokémon as they became inadvertently over-leveled, hoarding items I would mostly never use... until I wound up dropping the game for a few years. Over the course of those years, I saw some of the criticism that this game received, and I didn't really get it. Everything seemed fine to the point that I'd played. Oh well, Pokémon fans can be pretty critical at times.

I picked it back up more recently, and pushed ahead with the main story. From there, it just went downhill. Lower, and lower. This sucked. If I weren't so loyal to the Pokémon main series of games, I probably wouldn't have pushed to complete it, especially with how much of a drag the final parts of the game were, wherein an utter lack of content gave way to anticlimactic repetitiveness.

The main thing I have to say is that everything about this game is so surface-level when compared to the other main-series Pokémon games. They tried putting a coat of pretty paint on stuff, but there's nothing of substance behind it. It might fool you for a bit, but it can't keep it up for long at all. It shows in things like the lack of flavor text after leaving the first town, for objects you'd be able to examine in other games (except Scarlet and Violet, which is similar and even worse in that regard), and the inability to enter the majority of buildings. (Of the structures that can be entered, many look near identical to each other, with the exception of buildings one is required to be in for story scenes. They wouldn't want you to miss the few locations they put any effort into designing, after all.) Where new towns in other games often promised crannies to peek into, small discoveries to be made, or unique features... this game largely presents the facade of new towns, where all you can do is pass through them.

In other Pokémon games, there are optional activities to participate in, some of which have a lot of depth to them! TV/radio programs, contests and performances/musicals, underground mining and secret bases, riding Pokémon, flying through the sky from location to location, the Safari Zone, Trick House, little side quests, gambling, photography, an entire second region to journey through (HGSS was just WOW), optional Legendary Pokémon to pursue, Entralink, the ability to pet or walk with one's party members — I could go on and on. There are no such treasure troves of optional content, locations, and features in this game. The most there is to mention here is like, Max Raid Battles and making curry. And you can play fetch with your Pokémon. (I believe it goes without saying, but I'm judging this game based on the $60 USD full game, not based on paid DLC.)

Once you're done in the Wild Area, I felt there's no real incentive to return — it's all behind you — and everything from there is a straight shot from one Gym to the next, broken up only ever so slightly by bits of an absolutely mediocre plot that had so little thought and care put into it. Pokémon games aren't known for their high quality story telling, but this is a new low. I can't even say that it seemed to me like the writers were trying. It felt so lazy, stingy, and stale, and not once did it touch me emotionally. It's devoid of the adventurous magic I've found to varying degrees in the games that came before it, as well as the more recent Legends Arceus and Scarlet/Violet. The story lacks imagination... They tried going for some plot twists, but they fell completely flat. Most of the characters have so little personality, you could copy the words spoken by one of them and paste them on another character's text box and it might not be apparent at all that you'd done so. There were a couple of main characters who could have been interesting, but the writers just didn't... really do anything with them.
There are a few nice music tracks, but not much I enjoyed relative to most Pokémon game soundtracks.

Overall, this game is an empty disappointment.

Dangun Feveron represents a road not travelled for Cave. In the sea of their shooting games, almost all of them can be traced back to the formula that Dodonpachi set out in 1997. Yes there are deviations there, notably in the Shinoubu Yagawa - lead games, but they still feel like cave games, radianting their polish, tight control, stylism and feel.

Dangun Feveron isnt a deviation on the Cave formula, it's a different formula entirely. For better and worse.

To put it bluntly, Dangun Feveron is just fast as fuck. The game's commonly compared to Toaplan titles, and whilst there are some aesthetic similarities and some bullet patterns that share a bit, the better comparison is in Caravan games, and games like Thunder Dragon 2 and Macross 2 from NMK.

Essentially, in Dangun, waves of enemies spawn almost instantly following the destruction of the previous wave. By speedkilling, you can spawn more waves and by extension, get more points from each stage.

Combine this with the point system involving picking up countless falling androids, some ludicrously fast enemy bullets, and player ship speed which can be chosen between "faster than most cave games" and "faster than any other shmup i've played" and you end up with a game which encourages zipping around the screen like nothing else.

And this shit is good. Feveron is a game that pushes the player to play faster, kill faster, move faster at every turn. Every single frame of this game is best spent doing something, demanding fast reactions and quick decisions from the player constantly. It's gloriously intense.

Probably too intense even. Feveron is a very, very hard game, that demands bonkers fast reactions constantly, whilst also having way more complicated patterns than the likes of NMK's games of this style, and they travel at ridiculously high speeds with very little room for micrododging when your ship can cross the entire play field in about half a second, with no means of slowing down.

And the presentation just does not complement it. Dangun Feveron's bouncy, disco theme and soundtrack is amusing and charming, but the more I play it, the more it annoys me. The frantic, intense nature of the gameplay just does not complement the off-brand staying alive soundtrack and how jovial it all is. Outside of the boss themes, the music is way too low tempo and relaxing for how bonkers the gameplay is. The vibe it gives off is very "take it easy", which almost feels like mockery when you get caught by a brutal pattern. It's also worth noting this is Cave's only shooter to outright take place in space, and it's just generally uninteresting to look at for large periods, and all of the stages end up feeling very samey.

Aside from the presentation, it has to be said the gameplay, whilst intense and fun, is probably also the jankiest full release Cave ever did. There not being any means of slowing down is a very weird creative decision the bosses don't seem built around, making them kinda suck. Ship and weapon balance is pretty dogshit, stages are often full of dramatic difficulty spikes and dips, zig-zagging between waves of unthreatening Zako and then 5 tough enemies at once, and there's a real lack of polish to how the game just feels overall. Cave's best shooters have exceptional direction in terms of level timing and control. Feveron's systems mean that the level timing and direction is weak and it's controls are so fast and slippery it's frustrating.

I also can't go without mentioning that Feveron might also have the dumbest bug i've ever seen in a shooter. If you reach the True Final Boss - which can only be accessed if you dont die the entire game, you are invincible for the entire fight. Apparently no one managed to reach the boss at the location test and it never got fixed. Sure, this doesn't effect me, but it's emblematic of a lack of polish that kind of pervades through Feveron.

The overall experience is just a bit sloppy, even if it is also exhiliarting and gloriously fast. The disco-theming would have been better used on a slower paced game and the gameplay itself really needs polish. Compared to the king of this sort of game, which i'd argue is NMK's Thunder Dragon 2, it lacks a lot in terms of stage direction and wave design.

This style of game has now basically long been lost. Dangun Feveron is one of the last of it's kind and Cave never touched the wave based concept again. And whilst I do think it's one of their worst shooting games at the end of the day, it's still good, and I do wish there was more like it. But i'm glad they went down the road they did.

Bee Storm is fundamentally misunderstood, and it’s easy to get why. It’s the sequel to one of the most renowned shooting games in one of the most renowned shooting series—by CAVE, the most renowned of shooting game devs—but it was not made by CAVE, it feels nothing like a CAVE game, and in fact it only coheres with the rest of the Dodonpachi series in its ship, environment and enemy designs (as well as—vaguely—in its combo scoring mechanic). It’d be incredibly easy to play it after trying the original DDP, glimpse its sludgy, basic bullet patterns, its knockoff sprites, and its sloppier combo system, write it off as a half-baked cash-in on a moderately popular IP by Taiwanese developer IGS, and move on.

To do so, however, would be to miss a truly divine game — one whose fun is hidden a few layers below its surface, admittedly, but one that nevertheless, in my opinion at least, stands with the best and most satisfying games in the genre. That’s right. Bee Storm — the fucking meme game — is one of the better shmups of all time.

Here’s why:

1. Grazing. Bee Storm has two modes — Bomb mode, and Energy mode. The former is the mode that most clearly resembles other games in the series, and is therefore the one that players would naturally try first: you start out with a stock of bombs, collect others from destroyed enemies, and use them to help you clear the screen of bullets and do big damage. It’s shmups 101.

The reason that the game is written off so quickly by most players, though, is that Bomb mode sucks and is boring. Stock is too plentiful, and the bombs do nothing to help increase or maintain combo. The game simply is not designed around this mechanic, and I suspect it was added late in development to get DDPII more in line with its predecessors.

So where does grazing come in? Energy mode. This is the real shit. In this mode, when you get close to bullets, you charge an energy gauge that you can then release as a huge laser, not only dealing heavy damage but also (if targeting a large enemy especially) putting your combo into overdrive. Additionally, you're granted a period of about 3 seconds of invulnerability, in which—crucially—you can dive into clouds of bullets and quick-charge your gauge all over again.

I could write forever about what a beautiful and satisfying and perfect system this is, but I’ll try to keep it simple: as the game gets more difficult, it becomes more about charging your laser as quickly as possible and unleashing it, over and over. As I played this way more, and as I learned the game and its patterns and stage layouts, I could tell with striking clarity that this is the way it was meant to be played. Where once I saw these rather mundane-seeming and at times odd clusters of bullets that make little sense in normal bullet-hell dodging context, I now see them as ammunition for my laser, and in that context the game’s incredibly tight design locks into place. Stage 5 is the most concrete example, where swarms of small enemies swoop low on the screen and quickly unleash dense, hatched lines of bullets, which you can hurl yourself into during your i-frames after lasering to immediately get a second charge. You can do this over, and over, and over throughout this level in particular, and throughout the game as a whole; and it feels amazing.

2. Aura / Scoring. The aura returns from Dodonpachi – essentially a halo around the player’s ship that manifests while lasering (holding the shot button instead of rapid tapping), and that deals crazy damage when held against an enemy. The cool thing is that, in Bee Storm, it also sends your combo into the stratosphere, and thus the game really encourages you to get up close to bosses and find safe spots to hang out in, and aura the hell out of them for intensely huge, gratifying point gains.

Which leads me to say: if you haven't, play Bee Storm for score! If you’re only interested in a survival clear, Energy mode can still be really fun, but it may become a notch or two less interesting. If you gun for those 9999 end-of-level combos though, every stage is a pure adrenaline rush: a potent blend of twitch action and studious, thoughtful play to find the best points at which to aura and laser-bomb and maximize the amount of score you can wring out of enemy patterns and bosses.

Add to this that the combo system from DDP has been made much more lenient– your combo simply decreases rapidly instead of dropping to zero when not being actively added to. Stages can therefore be combo'd more organically than in the rigid DDP and DOJ, and missing one scoring strat can be made up for by nailing another later. If you really want to go advanced-mode, you could also try remaining underpowered, which allows enemies and bosses to hang around longer to be milked for score. It’s all got great flow and impressive balance if you marinate in it a while–something that the game’s unfortunately hastily garnered reputation has obscured.

3. Shot type diversity. Isn’t it rather annoying to have to commit to a single shot type (wide vs. narrow, e.g.) and ship speed for an entire playthrough, as you have to in most modern shmups? Bee Storm says fuck that, and allows you to cycle through each of its three variations during a run by pressing the Start button. I love to mostly stay in narrow formation with quick speed, darting back and forth through enemy fire for graze; but it’s fantastic to be able to resort to the screen-control-friendly wide shot when necessary. (I didn’t find much use for the second, middle ship type throughout the game, except during the true last boss fight, where, for me, it provided the perfect speed to weave through the massive number of bullets and graze for countless devastating lasers).

4. Safe spots. One common criticism leveled against the game is that it’s janky for having so many spaces to hide from enemy fire, especially during boss fights. To which I say: what’s the big deal? As someone who cleared the game with a decently high score not by watching replays but through my own repetitious playing and learning, figuring out where these spots were and exploiting them was a massive part of the game’s charm. I’ll go even further to say that I think many if not all of them exist for a specific reason, for scoring potential or to take advantage of the aforementioned laser-charges during i-frames. They don’t feel haphazard, or detrimental to the game’s balance, at all; rather, they give it an extra dimension on top of its other already-compelling systems.

5. Level diversity. Having different gameplay ‘themes’ across different stages is a relatively common thing in shmups, but you’d probably not expect to find such a pristine example of it in a game as widely mocked as Bee Storm:

Stage 1. A simple boss fight introduces the graze mechanic with highly linear, train-rail bullet patterns, and provides a cool opportunity to puzzle out how best to take it apart for maximum score (seeing as you’ll be playing it many, many times).

Stage 2. A more conventional shmup stage that introduces tight combo maintenance with a blend of popcorn enemies and larger tanks that can be aura’d. Perhaps the most DoDonPachi-style stage, with a boss that’s easily defeated but that has significant score milking potential.

Stage 3. An almost Garegga-esque stage, with wave after wave of giant ships to take out, each with multiple turrets and with popcorn enemies in tow. Here the gameplay differs greatly from stage 2, overwhelming you with bullets quickly, forcing you to bomb and providing clear and enticing opportunities to recharge. The boss is all about disassembly, piece by piece.

Stage 4. Here, ground enemies are the highlight, with tanky robots and fencing structures providing tricky barriers to your shots penetrating further upscreen. The boss features waves of ultra-fast spread patterns, the likes of which don’t really show up anywhere else in the game.

Stage 5. This is the aforementioned laser-bomb-fest, where the way that enemies are laid out (especially in the latter half of the stage) allows you to continually hurl yourself into fire while invincible, dodge for an agonizing 4-5 seconds while the bar recharges, and then unleash all over again. The boss of this stage is the best in the game, teasing you with major aura opportunities but punishing you if you get complacent.

Stage 6. A tough-as-nails, classic exercise in pure dodging. True bullet hell, with a nasty final boss to match.

Stage 7. A true last boss that you only reach if you exceed 400,000,000 points – a brilliant decision from the designers that forces you to reckon with the game’s scoring structure (and hopefully recognize the fun in it!) if you want to experience all of its content.

If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I like this game a lot. I was extremely tempted to give it a perfect 5, which would put it above the original DDP and its lauded successor DOJ in my personal ranking; but after considering it more, I think that’s a bit much. To me, DDP2 simply sits right alongside its series brethren. It sports different mechanics, sure, but it’s absolutely an equally-thrilling dopamine rush, if you’re willing to look past all of the hasty naysaying and some clunky spritework and music, and find it.