Depois da decepção que foi Twinbee e Moero Twinbee de famicom eu não tinha muita expectativa pra Twinbee 3: ポクポク大魔王 MAS ME SURPREENDEU

Ele já começa entendendo duas das fundações de Twinbee
- O sistema de Power-Up de sino
- Os dois braços que lançam bomba
Twinbee 1 de famicom tem uma execução ok dos power ups e uma execução péssima do segundo item, Moero Twinbee até executa os dois de uma forma decente, MAS TEM FASES HORIZONTAIS que não fazem NADA direito.

Twinbee 3 não só tem uma ótima base como ele faz coisas que no futuro seriam marcas registradas de twinbee. Pra começar a musica é EXCELENTE. Os graficos são muito bonitos pra um jogo de famicom apesar da limitação de cores tirar um pouco do brilho ele tem sprites grandes de inimigos muito criativos que dão um charme pro jogo, junto dos cenários que são bem feitos se levar as limitações em consideração.

O jogo não tem continue mas ele é balanceado e pensado pra isso (DIFERENTE DO TWINBEE 1 DE FAMICOM) então mesmo que você perca vidas o jogo não vai ser sofrível pra continuar como é no 1 e no Moero (sim, o moero tem continues infinitos mas as fases horizontais são um inferno).

O jogo é facil, mas pra mim isso não foi um ponto negativo. Penso nele como um kirby de shmup que eu vou recomendar pra varias pessoas assim como o Twinbee Da! de game boy que usa o twinbee de arcade como base mas também pega muitas ideias desse twinbee e executa tudo perfeitamente, como eu disse antes como Kirby.

Apesar de gostar muito dele tenho algumas pequenas criticas.
O jogo tem duas dificuldades "Raku Raku" (algo como facinho) e "Jigoku" (literalmente inferno), joguei nas duas mas não terminei em Jigoku porque eu não vi tanta diferença assim só vi mais inimigos na tela e me pareceu que tavam lá mais pra apelar ao contrário dos inimigos no Raku Raku que a posição parecia bem planejada. E os bosses tem uma vida ridiculamente longa na maior dificuldade, no "facil" (apesar do nome eu diria q é o normal) os bosses já tem uma barra de vida um pouco longa, ainda mais se você estiver sem power ups, mas no Jigoku eu achei um exagero transformarem eles em esponja de dano.
Varias vezes a tela inteira do jogo deu um bug e isso não me atrapalhou mas incomoda um pouco.
E eu acho que o jogo poderia ser um pouco mais longo, eu zerei ele em uns 30 minutos e ele é bem facil. Queria que tivessem mais fases pra não ter uma dificuldade artificial como o Twinbee 1. Na minha review de Twinbee Da! eu não reclamei que ele era curto porque isso é mais aceitavel num jogo de game boy, não num jogo de famicom, não atrapalha a experiencia mas poderia ser ainda melhor.

Joguem Twinbee 3 ❤️

Game Review - originally written by Pennywise

Twinbee 3 is a neat little shooter for the NES. You shoot clouds and bells come out of them and then you shoot the bells again to change your powerup. Aside from that you blast enemies on the ground and in the air and that is pretty the gameplay in a nutshell. One of the things I like about this game are the bosses. They’re a real hoot. And the difficulty, can’t really comment on it because I use cheats, but there are two difficulty modes and if you beat the harder of the two then you get a special ending. There are probably more special endings, but I have no idea how to find them in-game.

Angel_Arle Twinbee reviews
Part 1: TwinBee for Arcade
Bonus: Twinbee for Famicom
Part 2: Moero TwinBee: Cinnamon Hakase o Sukue! for FDS
Part 4: TwinBee Da!! for GB

After the mixed things going for Moero Twinbee, what was next for the flying machines to do? Well instead of going on the FDS, this time we are back on a Famicom cartridge. Still no Arcade game. TwinBee 3: Poko Poko Daimaō (translated as TwinBee 3: The Aimless Demon King via the fan translation) would be the next entry and I had not played this one before despite always having interest in it. I played it a couple of times and there won’t be too much to discuss with this one.

The plot this time is not given in the game itself unlike last time. The plot has Dr. Cinnamon asked Mellow to run an errand for him but mysteriously never came back. With suspicions raised, the Demon King Poko Poko comes to tell the Doctor Gwinbee has been kidnapped. It’s up to Twinbee and Winbee to save the day. It should be addressed that the game never actually mentions the pilots from Moero, not even in the manual. It wasn’t till a rerelease of future games I’ll talk about where they mention this probably to make it less confusing about wtf happened to them.

Horizontal stages have been cut and we are back to being a pure vertical shmup once again. There are five stages total this time like the original game and this time you can pick between Twinbee or Winbee. Winbee is the easy mode of the game letting you fire four shots on screen at a time and having a barrier that can take up to 15 hits while Twinbee’s lasts only 10. You now lose one arm at a time just like the original Arcade game which is a very welcome change to bring back. The first four stages can also be played in any order to help you pick what stages you are best tackling in a specific order.

Bells are pretty much the same here as they were in Moero but there is one change that makes the game a lot easier. The shadow ships and barrier can now be combined and the barrier can even be regenerated to full when you still have one so don’t try to follow the previous game’s rules for bells. Speed also has a cap of seven this time around. Ground enemies can once again drop items like points now featuring the fruit from the first game and money bags from Moero. The ? either does nothing or kills all enemies. The milk bottle gives you a 1-up like before. The candy gives a 3-way spread shot which sadly isn’t as good in this game and the 5-way spread shot is also missing in this one. The fire match lights up bells and when collected will give you invincibility until you reach the boss, that may sound broken but they’re usually given close to the end of the stage. Dr. Cinnamon’s face can also be collected once again for a bonus stage to get more points. Now I have to say the most optimal weapon has to be the laser. I found it a lot more useful in this one especially since bosses are more of a threat than they ever were before. The Twinbee angel also returns when you die in this game but unlike last time, you can collect it everytime you die instead of it only being the first death meaning you’ll never have a dead run like previous games.

The game is back to being a 2 player co-op game and once again you have special things you can do together that I wasn’t able to do. One notable one I found interesting was if you both have the barrier, you can join together to form an umbrella barrier which sounds really cool. Man, sometimes I wish I had friends.

Stages this time are at their most creative here! We have some really cool locations like fighting musical instruments like cymbals on the Air Island, scary banana creatures along with whales at Wanana Bani, a medieval stage with dragons and grasslands called Castle Land, a mining place with minecarts and cannons called the Dungeon, and then the Final stage with many magic acts on a generic checkerboard okay they could have been a little better there. Stages are pretty short in this one which is a little shocking considering the stage amount. In fact I should address that this game can be pretty easy, it’s usually cited as being too easy as well. I would argue it’s a good game for beginners but some might scoff at this one for its lack of challenge. I will say had it not been for the barrier, I’d absolutely hate the last stage with how much it throws at you near the end of the stage, it’s ridiculous. I think of three games, this one I liked the levels the most but I do think that’s because it lacks what Moero faltered in. This game feels like if Moero had only vertical stages and even a little better than that.

Then you got those bosses and oh boy they are something. At first I was mixed on them when I got to Crystal Jizo where he took way too many hits and felt too repetitive. The bosses have a lot more health in this one and also love to do this thing where you have to destroy multiple things to have the boss be dead. Take the Ukulele Band for example, you need to kill all the band players but then the main one comes back and you have to destroy her again and it can take a lot of firepower so try not to zone out! The fourth boss named Unadon is just tedious especially since his placement can just be annoying and drag out the fight. The Demon King himself also isn’t too hard especially on the easy difficulty. Look if you have a lot of lives, you’re gonna win so don’t even bother dodging if you don’t feel like it. Regardless of some of the iffy bits, this is still the best ones in the series because at least they feel like a threat this time and plus they ooze a lot of charm. The dragon isn’t even gonna fight you, he just wants the pests out of his teeth to make sure his teeth are clean. It’s good to decentish stuff but could be better. Once you beat that pesky King then you save Gwinbee and you’ll go back home and the credits and viewpoint changes depending on the difficulty. It even has fake names on the hard mode credits!

Graphically this is the best Twinbee has ever looked, even more so than that first Arcade game. It’s great to see Konami improving it with each entry we see of the series on the Famicom. While there is some flicker and I swear I saw a couple of screen glitches during my playthroughs, it doesn’t stop the charming visuals. The music is also quite nice and there’s a lot more of it finally. They even did the thing the final stage in Moero did where each stage has its own powerup theme which is great. If you’re someone who likes hearing Konami music on the system then you owe yourself to give it a listen. The game even has some voice samples though not that many but still neat to see!

Twinbee 3 was a nice game to play after playing the previous games to just see how they got better and better with these entries. While there are better Konami shmups on the console and I’d argue even Crisis Force is a better co-op shmup, you can’t go wrong with this one. That said, idk if I would go back to this one much because well, later games as we’ll see will greatly improve the formula making this one a good but just another sequel for the series. I’d still recommend playing it at least once unless you really just don’t like easy games. It sadly has never gotten a port on a collection or even one of Nintendo’s retro services like VC or NSO so stick with the real deal or an emulator if you choose to play it. While it’s not the last classic Twinbee game, I’d argue it’s the last one in terms of trying to improve what’s there as next time we will be on the Game Boy with Twinbee Da!! The final game in the classic Twinbee saga, we’re almost through it all already folks. I’ll try to go through that one sometime soon. See you soon!

It's more twinbee! No horizontal stages like what Moero had, which was what I expected. The game definitely has that late famicom feel to it in its presentation as things are colorful and detailed. This game is hella easier than the first two, I'll tell you that for sure. I 1CC'd this game on the "らくらく" difficulty on my first shot, didn't even need to increase the amount of lives I had or anything. However, on "じごく..." difficulty I did get a game over on the last level so perhaps shmup veterans should crank the difficulty up. They rebalanced everything by making it trivially easy to get the speed up from bells which makes powering up quickly a snap. Twinbee controls really fluidly but some of the enemies kinda chop around when they move so yea. This is probably a much better starting point into the series than 1 or moero since 1 is really hard and moero has those horizontal stages that aren't done in the series again. I hope the sequels keep the balance changes to the powerups while tuning the difficulty to be between easy and hard.