The next group of modes are the Arrange games. The first of these you should play is Arrange A (ver L). Arrange A adds a new ship to play, piloted by an all new waifu. This ship is possibly my favorite of all of them, so it was worth it to play as that ship even beyond the change in the story and the slight update in mechanics. The ship (and character) originally came from DoDonPachi Blissful Death, a game that had a very limited arcade run and was subsequently released on iOS. Arrange B (ver B) is the other game in this subset of modes. Arrange B is almost a training mode, but instead of just making it easier like the official Training section of the game, it allows you to set all the parameters for a specific stage and play it alone as its own separate entity. This is a nice way to practice if you keep on meeting up with a brick wall, or just experience a favorite stage all over again.
The last subset of these modes are the Black Label game modes. Since the game does not warn you otherwise, I will do so here. Do not touch these until you have completed all the other modes of the game. Even at their easiest, they are brutal compared to the rest of the games. There are more bullets, but more importantly, the shots coming at you are a lot faster than they were before. The first Black Label mode you should try is called Black Label Novice. That screenshot you see above is from this mode, so don’t expect a cakewalk like Normal 1.5 Training mode was. After that you can go for the absurdly (but satisfyingly) difficult Black Label mode.
Black Label not only adds a lot of difficulty, but there are some new shot mechanics added and, in general, all the upgrades to gameplay were added from the previous versions of the game. Additionally there is a new final boss once you are finally able to make it to the final stage without continuing. Even on the easiest difficulty that will likely require quite a bit of practice. That’s not to say it isn’t fun. If anything it’s more fun because of the feeling of accomplishment you get from success. The last Black Label mode is Black Label Arrange, which is a new version of this game which has never been seen outside of Japan until now. It takes the Black Label stages and story and adds a new character, Tigerschwert from KETSUI. I’m not sure whether I like this new character as much as I like the one from Arrange A (ver L), but perhaps I will with more practice. Right now I’m just struggling to survive Black Label long enough to not have to use bombs to save my bacon all the time.
But that difficulty is the point of this genre. If you don’t want the challenge, there are other space shooters out there. Once you get good enough at these games there is pure pleasure to be found by balancing the stress of sliding your hitbox through that one pixel gap in the bullets combined with seeing all those gold shards fall after obliterating dozens of enemies on the screen at once. My one major issue with the porting of this game is that there are some pretty long load screens between changing game modes. Thankfully, once you are in the mode itself, there is no more loading from that point. There is some definite slowdown on the stages, but if you are not a fan of these games you may not realize that the slowdown was intentional on the port. They try to include the slowdown in all portions of the game from the arcade release. Not only does that make the game arcade perfect for nostalgia (and for tracking your score accurately between all the versions), but the slowdown often helps you a little with dodging insane bullet configurations. While it may seem like a porting error, for me it is not a negative.
The art design and music in this game is second only to Deathsmiles for this genre and developer, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s just me, but the robot girl aesthetic appeals to me a lot more than the insect one from their last game. Even beyond that personal taste, the animation was definitely improved and the pixel designs are a lot more well defined. Additionally this game has some really great electronic dance music going on in the background. This also really matches the cute robotic voices that accompany the bosses when they appear. The music does change subtly across the different game modes, with the Black Label games being the largest change and the best versions of the songs. The asking price of $29.99 might seem pretty steep for a bullet hell shooter, and if there were just one game mode then I would agree. But for a complete collection of all these different versions of this series, I find it quite reasonable. For a typical run through the game it will only take you less than an hour to complete all the stages (even less if you don’t reach the final stage). But this game, and others of its ilk, are all about the replays and building on your skills and high scores. That hour will extend into the dozens, and possibly hundreds, if it really catches your fancy. I may like Deathsmiles a bit more, but that is a sidescrolling bullet hell shooter. This is possibly my all time favorite top-down bullet hell shooter, and that’s no small feat as I play a lot of games in this genre.
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Review Copy Provided By Publisher
