Very tight design built around the forward-only shooting scheme, and stands out from other military shooters with its metallic-green desaturated pixel art. I actually liked the tension of the autofire restrictions, I can't name many other arcade games where mashing felt rewarding instead of begrudging. Would be a lot more fondly remembered if the difficulty didn't jump tenfold in stage 5, these hitboxes are not forgiving enough for me to weave between so many bullets with so few checkpoints.

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More shmups need final bosses that switch genres

Wild Guns-like that's mostly really excellent, I was surprised how even into the later sections of the game, the enemy patterns stay consistently fair, creative and interesting. Every screen is a densely-packed and panoramic canvas full of things to pummel away at. It gets monotonous due to low damage output though - many later sections force you into jumping to dodge, and you can't fire while jumping, so there's no good way to shoot back, and even if you can, you're doing like 3-5% of their healthbar at a time. By the end of the run I did find myself taking intentional deaths because it was more fun to spam my bomb button rapidfire than to try finding those microscopic opportunities to return fire.

Raizing's first game tows the line between the literalism and weight of 4th gen art production with the maximalism, polish and particles of the coming 5th gen of shooters. The shmup loop is nothing special but the use of space and physical presence is something you rarely see in shmups - crowds tossing non-lethal crap at you during a boss rush, enemies that slam giant marble columns across the broad side of your ship, airborne fighters that buckle and lose altitude as you destroy their jets, just to name a few. This is a standard of visual design I want to see much, MUCH more of in the indie space.

Dude why did I give this a 1.5 before

This game leaves a weird first impression, has kind of that Thunder Force effect where enemies don't attack much but when they do it has almost no pre-empt and an unforgiving hitbox. Then you get to the bosses and their bullet patterns seem impossible to avoid. But on replaying this I learned 2 crucial things:

1) You have a dodgeroll that reflects everything and can be used anytime
2) This game has DDP chaining and you get OBSCENE amounts of extends

Combining these two makes for a very unconventional shmup, because you're not so much dodging as you are managing the dodgeroll economy and trying to keep a constant stream of damage on-screen. It's an extremely modernist and indie conceit but handled very well because of the freckles of shmup fundamentals underneath and stellar cyberspace resonance.

Clearly, between this, Sin & Punishment, Star Fox 64 and that cancelled Viewpoint sequel, the N64 needed waaaaaay more shmuppin' in its veins.

Homestar Ruiner - 6/10
Strong Badia The Free - 7.5/10
Baddest of the Bands - 7.5/10
Dangeresque 3 - 10/10
8-Bit is Enough - 8.5/10

When I played this for the first time in middle school i thought it was the bees knees, but it's got a lot of filler coming back to it - the rapid-fire razor-sharp comedy of homestar is hard to stretch out to 5 games at 4-hour length each. The snippets of good content is definitely worth the trip though

Best part of the experience was getting to Dangeresque 3 in a call with Vi, it's always a treat seeing ppl react to strong bad stuff for the first time

Generally better than NEO with how you unlock extra abilities and skill customization way sooner on top of a more jovial party of characters, but I'm docking it mad points because 1) the majority of the game is an asset flip and 2) if you pick Cyrille for the end-game chapter you're fucked. Her stats aren't balanced at all for the last dungeon and you have to pull about 5-7 hours of grinding just so shit doesn't kill you in one hit. And when you do finally beat it you get an explicitly not-done anticlimax ending with like 2 lines of dialogue and a cut to credits. I'm gonna dig a bit further to see if Toma's route has anything resembling a real ending, but damn is this an embarrassing way to end your game