This is Sakura Flamingo Archives. It's currently the most expensive thing in my collection; [PriceCharting puts it at $659, and earlier this year, some truly deranged soul forked over $969 for it. No video game is worth this kind of markup, but Sakura Flamingo Archives, especially, is Not Worth It.
Sakura Flamingo Archives is a collection of 5 shmups from the Japanese developer MileStone: Chaos Field, Radirgy, Karous, Illvelo, and Radirgy Noa. While all five were released in an earlier, bare-bones and region-locked compilation for the Wii titled MileStone Shooting Collection 2, news of a Xbox 360 version--a platform that had become an unexpected haven for quality shmup ports--held the faint promise of more features and a region-free option.
Unfortunately, this port sucks ass. Virtually every game suffers from framerate slowdown and incredibly poor sound balancing--the sound effects not only sound much worse than the original releases, they're so loud they drown out the soundtrack, even when adjusted to the lowest possible setting. In the case of Chaos Field, these issues are so pronounced it's barely playable. There's no TATE option for the vertical scrolling games, or screen options in general. Leaderboards sometimes fail to update, even locally, and there is no replay feature. Mixture, one of two new modes, doesn't even seem finished--there's no wrinkles to the scoring beyond "blow stuff up," nor an ending. It's not even region-free. lmao.
How did it become one of the most expensive games on the Xbox 360? Honestly, I'm not sure, though its convoluted release history probably plays a role. It's one of the last games released for the JP Xbox 360, and "last console release" generally bumps the price of a game up. On top of that, both MileStone and publisher KLON were essentially dead at the time of Sakura Flamingo's release--MileStone's president had been arrested in 2013 for...biofuel sales fraud? , which led to the dissolution of the company. KLON appears to have stopped all functions around Fall 2014--their website is gone, but their twitter still exists. This collapse explains the poor quality and nonexistent post-release support, but it's still hard to see how all this could push a game close to the thousand dollar mark.
I mostly bought it (a used copy, $290) because my only real collection goal nowadays is completing the JP Xbox 360 shmup catalog, and SFA is, outside of the CAVE mega collection, the most costly game in that set. Illevo and Kaorus are pretty cool too, despite all the issues this port has, and the local co-op option means I can get people to try out this awful port while regaling them with the bizarre story behind it, which is kind of fun.
But really, I should have gone with emulation. x_x
