I went into this not expecting much, maybe even to dislike it but I actually had a really good time! A relic of the time before the bullet hell arms race its successors would inherit, its comparatively sparse levels give it a fairly smooth difficulty curve unironically making it not such a bad entry point for newcomers. People don't seem to regard the music too highly but I think it's got some bangers in it. There's a fair amount of jank though and some cheap shots here and there so it does kinda noticeably lack the polish of DDP. It's not so bad, DDP and DOJ are just tough acts to precede. Humble beginnings, I guess.

CAVE looks for magic right off the bat and doesn’t quite find it.

DonPachi serves up a meat and potatoes bullet hell experience in the early days of the subgenre. Being the first game from CAVE and in multiple ways a torchbearer for Toaplan’s legacy, DonPachi has a lot to prove. As a promise of great things to come it gets high marks, but as CAVE’s grand arrival in itself? It leaves me craving something more.

Don't get me wrong, I like DonPachi a lot and there's plenty to appreciate here. This game introduced three iconic ship types of varying strengths and weaknesses, nailed down the series-staple rapid shot/focused laser weapon that existed in embryonic form in V-Five, and brought with it an innovative scoring system based on killing chains of enemies in rapid succession to stack up massive point multipliers. DonPachi tries so much and gets so much right, and it's easy to see the ways that CAVE's later classics stand on its shoulders.

The chain-based scoring system and iconic ship types lend the game a nice flavor, but even with a good flavor DonPachi can be a dry, tough steak sometimes. The stage layouts are fun but a little muted, rarely blasting off into the full-blown controlled chaos and mayhem that the very best STGs trade in. The sound is muddy as hell and the soundtrack isn't hitting. The final two stages of the game are each fully five minutes long (double the length of stage 3), and the encounters within them can't save it all from becoming a bit of a slog. The chain system is a solid blueprint but the timer is so short and strict that it's limiting; the sequel would loosen that timer up a bit, allowing for more intricate routing and the ability to chain entire stages.

CAVE's debut is a very good time, but it has neither the flash and fire of its older cousin Batsugun, nor the refinement of its younger brother DoDonPachi.

That announcer does own though.

Donpachi is very down-to-earth as an intersection between trad shmups and danmaku - almost too bland, but for what it's worth, it strikes the appeal of Toaplan's games pretty well while slowing working upwards to what Cave would later become. Simple, but serviceable, and the first three stages are extremely fair in their design. Sadly, 4 and 5 are a pretty gratuitous bump in difficulty, and I don't think the core design at play here is stylistic or creative enough to warrant chasing a 1CC.

If the beginner-friendly design extended to stages 4 and 5 as well, this would be a great game for people to learn shmup strategy conventions, and a nice side game for experts to drop into while cooling off from harder games. As-is, I don't dislike much of what it does, but it doesn't have much gripping power, and its legacy revolves exclusively around what it would later inspire within the genre.

I have embarked on a ridiculous quest to play every single CAVE shooter, and what the original DonPachi has taught me is that these games are actually very chill if you just crank hundreds of virtual quarters into MAME and spam screen-clear over and over and just be content to be mesmerized by the pretty bullet-patterns and the PERFECT '90s arcade visual/aural aesthetics of it all.

In all seriousness, I don't get the lukewarm feelings about this game! It feels very tightly designed (I feel that with a few more full playthroughs, I could start to really learn the patterns), you have a few ship options with compelling differences, and it just has that satisfying arcade-shooter magic of being just hard enough, but also just fun and compelling enough, to make you unfrustratedly want to pop in "just one more quarter" -- a kind of lost gaming artform that always impresses me.

There's some bottom-of-the-screen stuff that happens on occasion that feels ultra-cheap, and ship-visibility becomes a pretty serious issue on some of the more complex backgrounds, but other than that I had a grand ol' time!

Played this just enough to start to stockholm myself but not enough that one credit into DDP wouldnt snap me out of it. Yeah this is playable, has the lasers, has the hidden bees, has a lot of the enemy designs/sprites the later games would reuse, is one of the first bullet hells, etc. But every ship is so sluggish compared not just to DDP but any later cave game — to the extent that I’d recommend everyone just play TypeC since TypeA isnt fast enough to not be frustrating anyway. And all the bullets are RED. Hope you like it and also arent colorblind and if you arent that they never just naturally blend into the background — for me unfortunately 0 for 3 there. It’s always nice to dig deeper into hard shmups and learn some survival, pick up your own basic scoring strats (which here is mostly just short bursts of chaining but whatever), etc. Maybe doubly so for a foundational game like this. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I think the time I spent on this wouldve been better off added to the time I’ve spent on DDP, DOJ, or even Batsugun.

1credit Pb: reached 2-3 with 12.9mil pts, Type C

This is my first SHUMP game and yeah.....I get it now. I understand, I comprehend, I see, I follow....

I...can keep going on but yeah this was so much fun even though I died a lot. It's really hard, no clue how one could go through this deathless seriously. There's way too many bullets on the screen at one time, the game literally had a few slowdowns because of it and they're so fast. I encountered many situations were I could not dodge so I just died. My heart goes out to the poor souls who had to spend a billion dollar just to beat 10 levels.

Music is ok, you aren't really paying much attention to it. Since the shooting sfx is so loud, it's basically just background noise. I mostly used the blue ship/jet because....it was blue and I like blue...yea. I accidently choose the green one once and I didn't really like it but I was so used to the blue one by that point so that could be one reason.

Regardless, I'm excited to go through this series and see how it grows and adapts through each proceeding entry.

CAVE's first shooting game and the one that would act as the foundation for all of their future shmups which fortunately improved on the formula, because as a starting point for CAVE Donpachi is... fine but not particularly impressive. Stages 4 and 5 drag on for almost twice as long as they have any right to and have some enemy designs/setups that feel like complete bullshit. The bosses on the other hand are strangely easy, especially if you take advantage of the various safespots throughout the game.

The announcer is great though

I've been wanting to start a series on writing about all of CAVE's shooting games (Shmups, STGs). I enjoy a lot of them, they're interesting, and I think there's a mildly interesting narrative I can weave about the evolution of a company's design over a decade and a half of being the most influential developer in a niche genre.

The problem with starting that series is that it has to begin with Donpachi, which is kinda boring. It's the sort of shmup that you'd see in the background of a sitcom taking place in an arcade. A extremely generic aesthetic combined with gameplay that's really not that compelling, decent but basic scoring, and a difficulty curve that often feels more unfair than challenging. The music is also very bland, especially considering the strength of the music in pretty much every other CAVE title.

The only things that really sticks about donpachi is it's very good sprite art and very good sense of control, which is something CAVE would continue to excel at. There's also the delightful announcer, who brings a certain energy to the game that only a foreign man pulled off the street for a mid-90s japanese videogame truly can.

It's really only in the minutae, and in the context of the past and future, that Donpachi becomes interesting - CAVE was formed from ex-Toaplan staff after that company went defunct, and Donpachi feels way closer to the style of Toaplan than CAVE's later work - fast bullets rather than lots of them, relatively large player hitbox, very little in the way of intricate bullet patterns. But just under the surface, the start of the style CAVE would effectively codify as "bullet hell" is just peeking out from under the surface. It's particularly evident in the second loop, where enemies stream large swathes of revenge bullets at the player on death, there's more of a reliance on hardware slowdown as a gameplay mechanic, the bullet count is generally higher, and the true last boss, Taisabachi, almost plays and feels like later CAVE bosses, albeit with far more of an emphasis on bullet speed than interweaving patterns. It's a shame that more of the game doesn't play like the second loop, considering it takes about half an hour of a pretty meh shmup to get to a more interesting, and absurdly brutal one.

In the end, I don't think Donpachi quite works. It's fundementally fine, but even comparing it to the work of late Toaplan - Notably Batsugun, Dogyuun and Grind Stormer- its pretty forgettable, and certaintly lacks thier flair. And to some extent, I think if it werent for who made it, and the game's successors, DonPachi would be mostly forgotten as one of many average shmups from the mid-90s. Fortunately for CAVE, their second STG - the sequel to DonPachi - was anything but forgettable.