![]() ![]() It also adds suicide bullets in later loops, more scoring opportunities, different enemy behavior, a shield that lets you take a single hit before getting killed, the ability to use the double bomber in single player mode, and a slightly altered color palette. This arranged mode which is meant to be played for a longer period of time, as the difficulty starts out a little lower, but ramps up over the course of four loops, where the original version only has one. Due to the company’s financial situation, it only found its way into arcades during location tests. Toaplan released a “Special Version” of Batsugun with some different mechanics. The song is dark, menacing, and fit the mood perfectly, that you are up against a truly powerful opponent. Another one of the best songs is “A Feeling”, which accompanies the fight against the towering battleship Jupiter. The theme for Stage 1, “Heart Beat”, deserves special mention, as it’s surprisingly laid back for a shoot-em-up song but sets the stage for the game perfectly. ![]() The soundtrack, by Yoshitatsu Sakai, equally good. Junya Inoue did a spectacular job on the art, putting forth some of his best work at the time. The art art and music are fantastic, making it Toaplan’s best looking shooter – an impressive feat after the phenomenal V-Five and Tatsujin Ou. The world design is fairly standard, though there are some cool level ideas, like the first level taking place entirely underwater, before surfacing and continuing over the sky. Additionally, pigs are hidden all over levels and finding them also grants extra points. involves collecting large, golden Vs (for Victory, assumedly) after large enemies are destroyed. The scoring system is fairly straightforward. When you die, you lose these upgrades but keep your experience level, so you always have some minimum baseline of power. If playing in two-player mode, there’s also a “double bomber” when both use bombs at the time, which create a super explosion three times as powerful as regular attacks. There has five stages in total, most of which are quite brief, and there’s only one loop. ![]() The gun can also be upgraded five times within each experience level. At level three, you typically spew out just as many bullets and have just as powerful attacks as most of the bosses, but that does not make the game particularly easy. Experience is really easy to get, as you’ll probably be fully powered up by about the halfway point. There are only three power levels, and once you would level up at maximum power, you instead get a screen-clearing bomb. Once enough experience is collected, your ship levels up. He may not look much like an alien, but his eyes are purple, which is enough for most people.īatsugun contains an experience point system where each enemy is worth a set amount of experience, with bosses worth 100 points while smaller enemies are only worth around 3. Olisis is the former prince of the invading army and has rebelled against his father because he knows that invading earth and killing billions of people is wrong. He always wears silly looking armor wherever he goes and carries a rose with him. Olisis is the founding member of the Skull Hornets. All are equipped with the usual assortment of single-use bombs too. Each is focused on range, power, or a mix of both. Ship A is called the Sky Mirage, Ship B is the Dragon’s Whisper, and Ship C is the Judgment Flasher. There are six main characters in total, although there are only technically three different variations, with two types of each to accommodate for two simultaneous players. An elite mercenary group called The Skull Hornets is sent in, who have special ships that can both fly underwater and into the stratosphere. ![]() Almost all of the same people who made this game went on Cave, including programmer Tsuneki Ikeda and artist Junya Inoue.īatsugun‘s storyline involves an alien force attacking earth. It also uses human characters as pilots, which had become standard practice in many shooters at this time. The most prominent aspects are, of course, the practice of filling screen with over a hundred bullets at once, as well as shrinking the hit box to accommodate for the massive about of fire. Batsugun marks both an end and a new beginning for the shoot-em-up genre – it was the last shooter developed by Toaplan, but it’s basically the birthplace of the “bullet hell” subgenre, containing many of its elements that were expanded upon in later games like Donpachi and other games by Cave. ![]()
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