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!
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!