Versus shoot-em-up with dash and melee mechanics. Trap your opponent with smart movement & combinations of special bullet patterns. Ability to turn into a shmup boss, generally either to finish off your opponent or recover health. Characters are pretty distinct from eachother. High level play is very intense & there's a lot of depth to how attacks can be used for area denial, trapping and rushdown. shmup skills can help you a lot.

Dash vectoring and forming traps with special attacks is quite similar to Virtual-On. This game was my foray into the versus shooter genre so it has a special place for that.

Killer soundtrack by Yasuhisa Watanabe (Metal Black, Kaiser Knuckle) and the Xbox360 version Rev.X looks great.

I wish I had a bigger opportunity to play this against people back when it was more active.

Fun weapon system and ingenious boss encounters. Accuracy is required with shooting to keep kill chains going. Scoring is tied to survival via leveling up weapons.

As a negative has a slow pace at many parts which can get tedious on repeat playthroughs. Often highly praised by people who don't know many shmups, but I genuinely enjoy it a lot. It certainly plays differently from most shooters so makes sense that it stood out back in the day.

It's interesting that the director thought that shmups were dead at the time and this was meant to be some kind of revision of them. He worked on Gunstar Heroes at treasure before this.

I think the implementation of RSG's scoring system is inferior to Ikaruga but I never enjoyed that game as much despite seeming to be more perfect in mechanics and design.

Versus shmup that feels the closest to a traditional arcade shmup out of this type of game I've played (compared to say Twinkle Star Sprites which is more puzzle-like and has a lot of unique quirks + neogeo slowdown). Single player is pretty solid too and there are difficulty modes to match any level of player.
Multiplayer games especially on the highest difficulty can get really hectic with the bullet patterns resulting in fun improvised dodging. Highly recommended to fans of the genre if just for this.
Netcode works nicely with input delay not being introduced unless you're controlling a boss form. You can easily play across continents with little issue, and bosses having their control nerfed is honestly justified for most of them.

There is an equipment system which sounds bizarre but in my experience overall makes the game better. The baseline ships feel a bit underpowered to clearing out enemies. While if you are playing with powered up shot + return bullets (these cause enemy kill chains like TSS, or deal tactical damage to bosses!) you can get up to crazy enemy patterns as the game keeps getting harder the longer you survive. Super fun in PVP matches.

For the past few years there has been a japanese & international group playing online on PC every Saturday @ 9pm JST for a few hours. The longevity of that group should be some proof to this being a hidden gem of a game.

1CC:d with all characters.

I love the aesthetic and general pace of this game and it was the first CAVE game that grabbed me. But it has some really janky things I cant dismiss:
- When you end slow movement by releasing the fire button there is 0.5s delay until you begin moving full speed again. This results in a burst of speed outside of your control unless you do a planned stop in place while unfocusing. Extremely weird design decision. The delay only makes sense for entering slow movement (without a rapid button), not exiting.
- One of the heaviest and most annoying slowdown behavior in any CAVE game. Super heavy slowdowns at parts of the game. At least it's not affected by player fire as much as SDOJ.
- Scoring system ruined with broken boss milking. Big portion goes to End bonus though so there is definitely something to play for after clearing the game. However M2:s PSI PS4/Switch ports alternate mode basically fixes the system.

Momentum-focused 3D platformer that feels like a 3D Sonic Team game from the Saturn era. Kind of a NiGHTS aesthetic going on as well. This game is about chaining special movement techniques back to back to move around quickly. Basic walking is a bad way to speed up or switch directions. Air dashing, using a grappling-hook type move and riding across terrain to keep your speed up is basically the core gameplay here.

The platforming levels get fairly challenging to clear later on. Mainly the optional Star levels but fully unlocking these requires completionist item collection which may not be for everyone.

The games boss fights seem very weak compared to the main platforming parts. I wish the Busker Bonus minigame wasn't in the game at all, being a trivial quick-time event at the end of every stage. It breaks the pace between levels a bit too much, including the minigame music not being stage specific.
Time Attack mode gets rid of this but that's essentially post-game. Speedrunning through levels does seem like the core appeal and most fun to have in the game.

Levels and especially boss fights have some dead air with auto scrolling rail grab, etc. sequences where you wait around for the next scene. The campaign feels a tiny bit bloated personally. I really started enjoying the level design around World 6-7.

When there isn't dead air the movement does feel very fast paced. Being a momentum based game messing up is just heavily punished. Even in optional levels you're often able to skip sections by fully using all your movement abilities.

The game at launch is a little buggy and also doesn't allow remapping your controls which is strange. The default 'pro' layout has many duplicate buttons and wants you to dash by double flicking the right stick which felt awkward. I had a much better experience after using Steam Input to change R1/RB to be a yo-yo throw button allowing dash by flicking the right stick once and pressing a button.

I had trouble perceiving depth visually on a few levels, especially if the ground is lava or something else that doesn't show the players shadow. Generally seems good though and I can imagine this being polished later.

Since time immemorial, through the foggy shroud of that unknown place we call the past, since man first airbrushed Gandalf smoking a pipe on the side of a van, there has been, floating in the aetheric vapor of the noosphere, a dimly illuminated dream, The Dream, pinpricks of the sublime in the collective mind of humanity. Some have glimpsed a piece of this dream- The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, Ultima, Dark Souls, Adventure, Dragon Quest, King's Field, Wizardry, and countless others, but each in turn have failed to capture The Dream. Perhaps they could not escape their worldly fetters and feared the purity and power of The Dream, perhaps they, like in the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant, only beheld some small part of The Dream, perhaps they greedily sought to pass off The Dream as their own. Whatever the case may be, the results have always been, like Conrad Gessner's illustration of the Cameleopard, a grotesque, a parody, and an imitation. Dragon's Dogma is The Dream, carved in the fullest relief yet, and lit by warm radiance, it is not artistically generic- it is pure, it is not unfinished- it is too great to exist in totality on this fallen Earth, it is videogames: fulfilled, it is proof that the creative endeavors of humankind are not wasted, it is the twinkle in the eye of Gandalf smoking a pipe airbrushed on the side of a van.

Is it too easy to say “for fans of the genre” and move on? Probably.

The pace here might be Final Vendetta’s greatest strength; I think it’s a stage too short (though that might be because at 6 stages, I’m just thinking on how it falls just shy of GoufyGoggs's list) but it puts other titles to shame by being something you can clear in 30 minutes. I imagine it’s a byproduct of having designed the game around the 1CC mentality, so it seems conscious of the fact that you'll be playing through the early stages a lot and that it shouldn’t be something you need to like, plan your day around.

Especially compared to something like Streets of Rage 4, where half-an-hour in you still feel like you’re warming up, this is a huge improvement. Some criticism just falls by the wayside when the game moves this fast; bosses are generally pretty weak, but they do their job as pace-breakers between the rapidly increasing complexity of the standard enemy encounters- really does get into the heart of the action with an appreciated speed.

And speaking of Streets of Rage 4, in looking over interviews with the developers, I haven’t seen any reference to it, but it seems like it was on the mind during development- the big hang-up when I go back to that game is how punitive the scoring system is, where one stray hit can negate your entire combo, and in a game where scoring and survival are so fundamentally linked, makes those innocuous failures seem all the more disastrous. Final Vendetta adopts a pretty similar system, but you’ll only lose your combo if you’re knocked down, making those stray hits far less annoying, and your failures feel more justified; the result of poor positioning or a bad read on your part.

There's a great interaction that capitalizes on this, where you have a dedicated button for attacking enemies on the ground, but those same enemies often have wake-up attacks that can knock you down in turn- so there’s always the temptation to push your luck and go for a bit of extra damage. It all comes together remarkably well, particularly love the mobility options you can use to cover the entire screen, though it did get me thinking more on some of the constraints of the genre.

This applies to beat ‘em ups/belt scrollers more broadly, but Final Vendetta is the most trouble I’ve had with gauging whether or not I was going to be hit by an enemy that was slightly above or below me- StrayCat noted that it could be an issue of layering, and it makes me think that your defensive options are more of a necessity than they might initially appear, giving you enough distance that you’ll unambiguously clear of an enemy attack. The weird lane system of Guardian Heroes also makes a great deal more sense after considering this more, giving you total clarity as to whether or not attacks will connect. The more I get into this genre, the more I become vividly aware of this as an issue: maybe that means we need more deviations like Guardian Heroes or Ninja Warriors, maybe that means that there’s some approach yet to be taken.

(I don’t know, maybe something akin to Natsuki Chronicle’s bullet-trail warnings would help to highlight the range of enemy attacks, though that might veer too much into “red light, green light” combat design.)

Anyway, that’s a lot to place on a single game: intensely scuffed, but the more time I’ve put into it, the more I see the intent and the passion behind it. If we live in a world where something can quietly release that’s this solid, then nature is healing.

///

Stray thoughts:

- Pixel art is nice, but disconnected, like you're fighting the spritesheets from 20 different ArtStation accounts. This is also one of many titles that would benefit hugely from taking place dusk or night- I can't totally get behind a game that's set at 1:00 in the afternoon.

- Enemies are also uncommonly versatile; wait around long enough and they'll toss out a surprise ranged attack or gap-closer. It's a good kit, but I wonder if does make them a little homogeneous with each other, like they all roughly require the same level of prioritization. More research required.