Jackie💿

Instantly one of my favourite shmups of all time.

I've never played a shmup that plays like this. The sword-heavy gameplay is almost character action game-like - really encourages you to be constantly getting close to every enemy, and discourages a stay-safe, stick-to-the-bottom-of-the-screen gameplay style. Between the fact that colliding with enemies doesn't hurt and the various bullet-deletion tools, they really provide the ways to play aggressively and be constantly moving.

I've mainly been playing as Murasame, the new ship, and I love the completely unique use of twin stick mechanics. The second stick doesn't shoot anything like in a normal twin stick mode - it lets you sweep a field over the game field to tag enemies and items. Tagged enemies become "allergic", where they're extra vulnerable to your sword - encouraging aggressive swordplay even more. Tagging all of the enemies in waves of popcorn enemies lets you kill the entire wave by hitting the enemies on either end with your sword, which feels so satisfying wheny ou pull it off. The explosions that travel along a wave when you do that damage enemies, which encourages waiting until an enemy wave is flying over a large enemy and then detonating them, doing tons of damage to the large enemy at the very end. It feels great and encourages some styles of planning I really don't experience in a shmup like this very often.

This is probably the best implementation of a health bar I've seen in a traditional shmup. Instead of lives, you have a battery meter, which slowly ticks down whenever EPS-net is down. Getting hit by an enemy takes off about 25% health, while beating bosses restores about 15-20% health and getting chains of 10+ enemies spawns health restore items that restore around 5% health. It's a great balance of letting you recover from big mistakes early in a run without making damage from enemies feel unimportant or insubstantial.

I wish I could understand more of the story; my Japanese isn't there yet. What I've seen is interesting, and they're pushing the in-game running social media commentary system from previous Radirgy games in some interesting new directions.

("Completed" in this case means a 1cc, with ending 1. I'm planning to continue to play for endings 2 and 3, and to improve my score.)