Got it this morning. Good game. I've played through maniac mode’s 5 stages (to the end boss from the famous internet video of the game). Lots of options in the game. Mainly screen positioning. To get the game to look tate you have to rotate it 90 degrees and zoom it to the size you want. The rotation alone does not resize the game window.
What the game also offers that I haven't seen in other STGs is a bunch of other play windows. Some creative stuff too. What I mean is that you can play the game normally with a wallpaper and the playscreen, or (as a random example) you can have four windows of gameplay, one with the main game, the other with your lifebar off to the right, one of your score, and one of the game itself, but magnified in a smaller screen. It makes for interesting playthroughs.
There a several modes you can select for the picture itself including changes to the color palettes, brightness, and some I admit I do not understand. Thankfully almost everything in the menus are in English. The descriptions of what the options are/do are in Japanese. There are only a few times I felt I needed an explanation of what the options are. My favorite was the zoom which you can use to make the playscreen fill up the television or shrink the picture down to a size smaller than a DS screen.
The game has version 1.5, arrange, and Black Label as playable game modes. 1.5 is the game as it is in the arcade, from there you chose 360 or arcade. I don’t know the difference between the two. Arrange is a bit more interesting. You have a secondary character which you can switch between. There is an attack that can repel enemy fire back at them. It makes them game quite easy and I have yet to find the catch to the special “bullet repel” feature in the arrange mode.
Black label tells me I need to sign onto Xbox live, when I do it takes me to a download screen saying I have a free download I need. But I can’t download anything. Wikipedia states a few things about this, nothing compelling.
Link
Also, there is a replay mode that lets you go to any stage/boss you want at any difficulty level. You can adjust your lives and bombs when you do this. There is also a score attack I didn’t mess with.
The game plays like the first one. Overall good game if not a bit short. Ultra mode (the hardest) seems beefed up from the last game. I was ok at ultra on the prequel, but man I got my ass handed to me. Graphically I was hoping the game would look like (if not better than) Raiden 4. It doesn’t. My one complaint is that I am not as wowed as I’d like to be in that department. Don’t get me wrong, graphics are not my top priority, it’s just that for a current-gen HD console there aren’t many shmup releases and I was hoping to be impressed.
The game probably ties Espgaluda as my favorite Cave shooter. I like the Espgaluda series better, but Cave is very good at making slight tweaks to their game formula each release they have. It may seem all you have to do is throw a bunch of bullets at a person in control of a small pixel, but I like to believe there is a bit more method to their madness. This title is worth a look by genre fans and non-genre gamers who may be interesting in it for novelty sakes.
. But if it's anything like most LE versions of these games it'll keep it's value well if I ever want to sell it.
