I've been complaining about a lack of more juicy, prescriptive shmup scoring discussions/reviews on twitter, so to be the change I wanna see in the world here's my attempt at it. And what a nice opportunity to gush about a game I love!
A Quick Intro
[ROLL] By wiggling your stick or, if you're playing the newer ports, tapping/holding the roll button, your ship will spin. It moves faster while spinning, and does more damage.
[BUZZ] Once you're spinning, getting close to bullets grazes bullets & increases your buzz. The goal's to rub as many bullets as possible! Every bullet can be grazed multiple times. More buzz = better. Simple as.
[BUZZ CHAIN] All your buzzing throughout a stage & gets added to your total chain. There is no timer or anything, but it will break if you die or bomb. You get a nice phat bonus for your chain at the end of each stage.
[EXP/LEVEL UPS] Buzzing & killing enemies gives you EXP, in the form of a bar in the top right. Once filled up, it gives you a level up and about a second of invincibility.
[IFRAMES] When you have iframes, you can buzz bullets but can't be hit, meaning it creates the perfect opportunity to dive into seas of bullets and keep chaining level ups.
[BOMBS] The bomb has 2 uses. If you tap the bomb button, you get a standard shmup bomb. This is garbage and should never be used because it breaks your buzz chain. If you hold the bomb button, you'll convert a bomb into a level up with iframes and everything, this is the main way you'll be using bombs when scoring.
All of this should suggest a clear, simple game plan - spin all the time, motorboat dense patterns and chain level ups for those sweet, sweet iframes!
Aggressive Grazing
Grazing-based scoring has a common problem - it encourages passive play. The games tend to have slower movement so you simply can't chase bullets around too effectively. They also tend to rely on bullet streaming, so slowly tap dodging across the screen is the name of the game. But what really kills off aggressive grazing outside of really high level play is just the fact that being inside tight patterns is risky as hell.
Psyvariar goes against this passivity. It has fast movement, it has iframes and it's less focused on aimed patterns. It turns grazing into a very aggressive, active playstyle right off the bat.
The Anti-Shmup
In some sense, Psyvariar is an inversion of shmup dynamics.
- Are you good at noticing negative space? Good now MOVE AWAY FROM IT and towards the bullet clusters!
- Can you identify the trajectories of bullets? Follow them and grazegrazegraze!
- Can you see where patterns overlap the most? Park yourself there and motorboat those bullets!
- Can you keep track of how patterns change over time? Perfect, now there won't be a wasted frame between those level ups!
- Can you move precisely at high speed? Congrats, your grazing opportunities just oppened up exponentially!
It turns the more binary rewards of reading patterns to survive into more granular rewards which are proportional to your skills. The better you are at the whole reading & predicting patterns thing, the more score you'll get.
Tracing Shapes
Bullets lying at the center of your interactions with the game means that the game's scoring strats are as varied as its patterns!
You will stream & tap. You will quickly move from one end of the screen to another. You will rotate with the enemy. You will find the densest concentrations of bullets and dive in. You will follow a boss while hugging its emitter. You will trace all kinds of shapes - C shapes, lines, spirals, blocks.
But that's not all! Because of the level up iframes, tracing itself can be incredibly dynamic. You can start by tracing a line, then get iframes and instantly change course towards an emitter to "cash out" your level up. The cycles of tension -> release make the game hard to put down.
X-Stages & Bosses
The game runs into a common problem that happens when you use what I call Double Edged Design. Because bullets give iframes, the game has trouble creating difficult patterns because the more dense things get, the easier you can chain iframes.
The game has a rather artifical but incredibly effective solution in the form of its bosses and X stages. They simply increase the amount of grazing you have to do in order to level up. With that one small, simple change the game's mechanics truly start singing.
Because of how granular grazing is, your exp gain will be different each run. Like sim racer players say - no two laps are truly the same. This inconsistency, when combined with a slower rate of EXP gain, means that you will have to constantly adjust your grazing strategies on the fly based on how much EXP you have.
This leads to some very fun on-the-fly reprioritization and decision making. Sometimes instead of jumping into an emitter right away, you will have to "lead into it" a bit by doing some micro grazes & chipping away at your meter. Getting it right up to the limit but stopping right before you get a level up. Sometimes you will outright avoid grazing some patterns in order to set yourself up for a more lucrative pattern that comes later. Sometimes you will take risks and dive in, not knowing if you have enough EXP to get a level up in time or not.
This is where the secondary bomb function comes into play. Do you go for a risky graze, or do you spend a bomb for safety? Having extra bombs in stock is very important for optimally scoring the last boss, so you have to decide if you want to sacrifice them or not on the fly.
It's a very enjoyable kind of decision making because it doesn't outright ruin your plans but distorts and modifies them. You always have a goal and you are always playing with intention, instead of flailing and relying on intuition. The little breaks in between boss attacks are almost like clearing a floor in Binding of Isaac and figuring out the best way to spend your resources. They are short breaks where you're given some time to think and decide.
Learning Curve
The beauty & fun of Psyvariar's design lies in its elegant simplicity. The broader question of what to do gets answered very quickly and you can immediately start focusing on the more nuanced interactions.
Since the game doesn't hide its "puzzle pieces" from you, what you get is a very smooth learning process. You won't completely change your routing to something different & frustrating cause you found some obscure trick, instead you'll mostly keep building on what you've been doing beforehand. The game has no Dodonpachi esque chain timers, so you can take risks at your own pace. The more confident & precise you get with your movement, the more options you'll have available to you. The game expands the more you play it, rather than contracting.
The only frustrating element of the game is how harshly it punishes death - it has 2 lives with no extends and no shields of any kind. Dying means you will lose your buzz chain which gets massively rewarded at the end of the stage, so dying late in a stage can be extremely painful.
This is probably the biggest roadblock of the game, and something that brings it a bit closer to the frustrating nature of Dodonpachi. Still though, everything else being so lenient and smooth makes up for it.
It's a brilliantly designed game that's hard to put down once you start, you should absolutely give it a shot, even if you do have to increase your starting lives in the settings!
Extra - The Wiggle
Originally, Psyvariar required manually wiggling the stick to roll & get buzz. This offered constant resistance to your movement that you had to compensate for, almost like a physics game. It's very akin to snaking in a racing game - you still need good lines even as you wiggle.
Later ports like the PS2 one and Delta added an auto-roll button you can tap or hold, letting you undermine that very important physical aspect of the game. I think the game lost a lot in the transition. Now, does that mean I'll be playing with manual roll myself? Lol. Lmao.
Also a small but important mechanic is variable damage based on your ship's current level. This gives you far more control over a boss' patterns because you can force them to go into the phases you want when you want by passing certain HP thresholds. Just an extra layer of decision making!
Super Extra - Survival Sux
Psyvariar has truly awful, boring survival gameplay. If you wanna play it for survival, you'll 1cc it within your first few runs, if not the first run. If you're just looking for a fun 1cc you're not going to find it here. This is alleviated somewhat by the fact that most content is locked behind scoring, but still - it's a huge problem of the game and something you have to accept upfront if you wanna have fun with the game.
