Brian's Friends

Oh, and also I just picked up Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles on playstation because for some random-ass reason they were TWO DOLLARS (/paperboy-from-better-off-dead-voice) for a couple of days, which is ludicrous. Those are the two most recent games by Qute (who made Eschatos and Judgment Silversword); they're very cool, and I was planning to eventually just pay full price for em.

I haven't fired up Natsuki yet (though I previously watched some footage), but Ginga Force is so wild and inspiring. The core of it is a story mode where you attack the levels one-by-one and accumulate a bunch of alternate loadout options, which is very anti-arcade design. (JSS and Eschatos both might as well have been arcade games.) The levels themselves are entirely designed around their bosses, which I find exhilarating — you're constantly interacting with (and shit-talking at) the boss throughout the stage, and can occasionally take a chip off em in between dealing with all the popcorn enemies and obstacles they're throwing at you. Structuring the level as a multi-stage chase scene makes for an incredibly grounded sense of place and context, which is exactly the kind of evolution I should have expected after Eschatos.

That's not really the first place I've seen some of those ideas; in Blue Revolver Val and Dee come to fuck with you mid-stage a couple times (and according to lore each level boss is directly remote-controlling their entire fleet), and a bunch of Touhou bosses fill in as their own midboss. But taking boss-based levels this far gives another effect entirely, and I absolutely love it.

Well, it's arriving at a good time for thinking about this stuff: I'm getting closer to a point where I need to buckle down on level and boss design for Ultra Badger Coyote (working title), so questions of how to build narrative and direction via action and space in a shmup have been on my mind. I think the best examples I've seen prior to this have been ZeroRanger, Eschatos, Radiant Silvergun, and oddly enough Ketsui.

• Most Cave games are just structured as "here's a cool new space you ended up in somehow, here's some enemies that might be in that place, here's a boss" — it works fine, but it's not narrative drive! Ketsui, on the other hand, makes it very clear that you're wading inch-by-inch through the nation-scale defenses in front of a single bastardly target with a known fixed location, and the difference is palpable.
• In ZeroRanger, of course, you're carving through the invasion fleet to get to Green Orange — over the city, through the excavation, up the space elevator, across the solar system, into the battlestation. It all serves the directional momentum (well, the excavation detour is weird if you sit and think too long, but w/e, it works), and the environments are all extremely structured, with memorable landmarks and wholly unique enemy formations.
• Eschatos is almost the same as ZeroRanger (which makes sense, they say it was their biggest direct influence) — over the city, over the country, through the atmosphere, TO THE MOON. It's not split up into levels in the conventional "take a break and show the score summary" way, so it all feels like a continuous and spatially-grounded journey. (Actually, Ketsui benefits from that too because of the transition areas they keep displaying during the stage breaks! Hmm.)
• Silvergun is too complicated to get into, but your objectives and destinations keep changing as guided by the narrative, and the big bad keeps showing up to fuck with you, so you're staying connected to your motivation to knock over the final boss.

Unrelatedly, I'm starting to close in on a Maniac 1cc of Mushihimesama (using S-type shot) which is probably going to be my first clear of a Cave game. It's gonna be a bit, still; I'm missing some answers for the stage 4 boss, the stage 5 boss, and the section around 3/4 through stage 5 where it just goes absolutely apeshit on you.

I checked out Kiwi's survival strats video, but I can't use his approaches directly because he's using the supershot exploit, and I've committed to avoiding that for this 1cc. (Short story: there's a programming oversight that lets you do way more damage and counter-gain by setting autofire up in a particular way. Most players consider it legitimate in score play, but I want to see if I can clear the game the way the developers thought they were balancing it. Kiwi's video shows that there are several boss patterns you can just not deal with because the supershot damage lets you skip to the next phase too quick, so I'm definitely causing problems for myself on purpose here.)