A unique looking and fairly unique playing horizontal shoot em up. Control a ship called the Flintlock, where the Flint is a detachable orb attached to the front of the ship. While attached you can charge up powerful shots that fires out lightning tendrils in front of the ship and can block some bullets that hit you in the front, when detached or launched at enemies it grows up to three tendrils depending on how powered up it is that will destroy enemies and block shots while your own ship will get to fire its main weapon faster. Weapons you can pick up including forward shots, a spiral shot with a wide area of effect, a shot that fires a separate beam aimed at the ground that moves along the ground once it hits, a homing shot, and the most interesting one being a shadow beam that shoots a thin beam in front of the ship the remains that for a short time that can be stretched out up or down depending on your movements.
Levels are varied and often involve the ability to scroll the stage up or down through your movement. The two more memorable ones being a planet with waterfalls running down in different areas that enemies are swimming through and a ship chase that seems to see jumping into lightspeed multiple times.
Getting killed will put you back at a checkpoint location, the loss of your weapon change and upgrades aren't the biggest deal since most of the challenge comes from effective use of the Flint and memorization of enemy locations or attack patterns and staying withing the tendrils of the flint to defend you or to watch your back but losing the additional tendrils of the Flint is a big loss and there are parts of the game where what is being thrown at you can be a bit ridiculous or where you are expected to maneuver in very tight areas that become almost impossible to get through if you have picked up speed upgrades.
The US version of the game is going to be worse as it removed all of the other weapon pickups instead only allowing you to upgrade your main attack and likely made the game too easy by making your ship smaller, allowing you to take multiple hits, giving health pickups, and allowing you to spawn where you died when continued (I wouldn't have minded that one or the ship being smaller being in the Japanese version).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1561570543924523008
Levels are varied and often involve the ability to scroll the stage up or down through your movement. The two more memorable ones being a planet with waterfalls running down in different areas that enemies are swimming through and a ship chase that seems to see jumping into lightspeed multiple times.
Getting killed will put you back at a checkpoint location, the loss of your weapon change and upgrades aren't the biggest deal since most of the challenge comes from effective use of the Flint and memorization of enemy locations or attack patterns and staying withing the tendrils of the flint to defend you or to watch your back but losing the additional tendrils of the Flint is a big loss and there are parts of the game where what is being thrown at you can be a bit ridiculous or where you are expected to maneuver in very tight areas that become almost impossible to get through if you have picked up speed upgrades.
The US version of the game is going to be worse as it removed all of the other weapon pickups instead only allowing you to upgrade your main attack and likely made the game too easy by making your ship smaller, allowing you to take multiple hits, giving health pickups, and allowing you to spawn where you died when continued (I wouldn't have minded that one or the ship being smaller being in the Japanese version).
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1561570543924523008