A pretty confounding arena shooter, with some cool design ideas (time = health, the power of your ship being tied to how many of the surrounding rooms you've cleared) marred by glaring problems in execution (you cannot see what the fuck is going on half the time because the interface is getting in the way, or your own bullets are obscuring enemy fire, or the camera is jolting around; and on top of that you're slip-sliding all over the place due to inertia, and therefore can't reliably make the sorts of dodges the game is asking of you!).

Honestly, it's extremely unique and worth a try. Just doesn't have the razor-precision that I personally crave in an arcade experience, and the visuals and music don't do enough to compensate.

Actually kind of love this, feels like a game that would come pre-installed on the terminals at the NERV command center. Riding by the seat of its pants with, no exaggeration, among the sickest visual styles I've ever seen in a game; very much the heavily stylised data diagrams of MGS VR Missions with the frantic hierogram twang found in a Central Dogma red alert. As a game, its gameplay as a top down arena shooter is largely basic & repetitious but not without its little strokes of genius that have me positively enamoured. The framework really is sitting right here, clear as day, for a great roguelite shmup - I adore the fact that adjacent cleared rooms grant you a damage bonus, on top of its breakneck arcade pacing begs some quick strategising to have an optimal run of a floor. With better controls, wider enemy variety and smarter AI behaviour/patterns, this would be the essential shmup tbh. An instant favourite, despite its shortcomings. I will dream beautiful dreams of a game that will never exist, this smashed together with Warning Forever.

Tragic game released at the wrong time. Despite the Simple Series appearance, this was developed by Cotton alumni and it shows, because even if you were to strip out all the thematic elements of the game, it still handles great and a ton of care was put into the game design.

If this game was released three years earlier, it would have held the same respect as something like Einhander. If it was released today, the stylish presentation and D&B/Jungle influences on the soundtrack would shoot this game to the moon, or at least get decent Steam sales. It just got lost in the shuffle as a late-era PS1 release with a budget price and label.

Sanvein, released in the States as Shooter: Starfighter Sanvein, is a highly stylistic 3d shooter that feels like a game built to run on the computers from Neon Genesis Evangelion. It looks amazing, and it's a lot of fun even just to get through the menus. If you're an Evangelion or shooter fan, absolutely worth checking out, though you might only stay briefly.

Developed by Success, who is more well-known for the Cotton series of shooters, for D3's budget Simple 1500 series, this is an arcadey, time attack 3d shooter with super fast micro levels. Each stage typically has less than five enemies to kill, and often you'll pop into a stage and pop right back out before racing over to the next one. There's a constantly ticking clock, and taking damage lowers how much time you have left. While the game is really fast paced and looks amazing, the sheer amount and lack of variety in the stages makes the game feel really repetitive. It's not that the core loop isn't fun, but that it isn't fun enough to sustain itself. Still, for me this is a "hidden gem" just because of how unique and cool it is look at.

My neighbors are always listening to really loud drum and bass... weather they like it or not!

After finding out new copies of Starfighter Sanvein only cost around 12$, I decided to buy one sight unseen. Worst case I'd be out ten bucks for the privilege of opening a brand new Playstation 1 game, and I'm totally fine with that. In fact, my copy was so new that the shrink wrap looked as pristine as the day it was applied, and the plastic tab on the back used for hanging it on a store shelf remained unbroken and affixed to the wrap. I've little doubt this copy of Sanvein came to me straight from the box it was shipped to the retailer in.

Sanvein is a short but solid shoot-em-up with a rather interesting gameplay loop. Each level takes place on a large grid composed of numerous hexagons, each one representing a battle with a common enemy or a sub-boss. Clearing each sub-boss makes a level boss appear, which then allows you to move on to the next grid. You can upgrade your ships power by clearing adjacent hexes relative to the one you're initiating an encounter in, so there's a level of strategy involved in which battles you take on and in what order you decide to. For example, you might want to clear 4 or 6 hexes surrounding a sub-boss in order to clear the boss quickly and with minimal damage. Complicating this is the way health operates in this game. Rather than having an HP bar or a set amount of lives, your ship operates off a timer that is constantly ticking away. Get hit and you lose 90 seconds, clear a sub-boss and you gain back 140. You don't get time for beating common enemies, and your timer continues to tick down on the level select grid, so you have to balance your remaining time against which hexes you choose to do battle in. It's a lot of fun and a really good concept for a shooter.

Presentation is where Sanvein really knocks it out of the park, though. The closest analog I can provide is the VR missions in Metal Gear Solid, both of which seem to be going for the same sort of early 2000s digital-world aesthetic. Everything exists in a black void populated by neon grids and hexagons, superfluous data readouts, and nonsense text like "REMAIN OF TIME RECOVERED" and "HEAVEN, UTOPIA AND TRUTH" which flash on the screen for about a split second before the game decides it's time to move on. The soundtrack is also excellent, though it mostly consists of very short but catchy loops, likely because you move between different encounters so quickly you'd never have much time to listen to a full track.

Success should take a break from doing Cotton games and consider rebooting Sanvein. I mean, think about it from a business perspective: weirdos like me will buy it and they can also charge something absurd like 60$ for what is essentially a cheap remake! This model has worked for them so far, I'm just asking they dip into some of their other IPs, that's all. At least you can pick up a brand new copy of this game for cheap off Ebay... that is until I buy boxes of Sanvein to throw into a woodchipper so the value of my copy skyrockets.

this game earnestly feels like it's just one insane meta-progression system away from being a moderately successful indie game

a fast-iterating, room-clearing non-quite-twinsticker where clearing rooms increases power in adjacent rooms, giving just a pinch of strategy to the dungeon delving. warning forever style system where time is health. really just a lot of cool ideas coming together for a good time

the ui of every single screen in this game uses about 5 different fonts at once and it feels like the future we never got. ux designers hate sanvein but i won't let them

the room's inhabitants get a little boring and samey quite quickly but again, that only strengthens this game's case as a blueprint of a successful roguelite. give it a look if you like weird innovative games that are unique without necessarily being amazing (aka you like to play ps1 games)