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shmup (n): Shortened form of “shoot-em-up;” a genre of 2D video games based on shooting down waves of enemies while dodging waves of projectiles. (Usually in an aircraft, usually scrolling in one direction, but not necessarily either.) Japanese synonym: STG (short for "shooting game").

Shmups are one of the most fundamental forms of action game; most of what I used to play on the Atari 2600 as a kid qualified as a shmup. But sometimes it's easy to confuse "fundamental" with "basic," and there was a long period where I wrote the genre off as a low-nutrient diversion that relied on cheapness instead of challenge.

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So a couple years back I got obsessed with a vertically-scrolling shmup called ZeroRanger. It drew me in with stellar audio/visual design and a spare and cryptic story about eternal recurrence and the cycle of suffering, but then it kept me invested with some intensely satisfying shoot-and-dodge gameplay. The varied weapon loadouts offered a ton of agency for approaching a challenge, and the risk/reward balance of the complex scoring systems pushed me to keep improving my aggression and accuracy. I played the shit out of that game and frankly so should you.

My main takeaways, once I had beaten the true last boss and gotten all the White Vanilla achievements, were:

1. System Erasure rules, and I should grab Void Stranger sight-unseen when it drops. (This turned out to be absolutely correct; more about this some other day.)
2. Shmups as a genre also actually rule, so what am I missing by not playing very many?

Thus, I roved out a-questing. I started out with some stuff I already knew of or had recently stumbled across, then started digging deeper with the help of some kind of opinion poll on a forum for intense genre otaku.

Here's some notes so far.

Ikaruga

• Developer: Treasure
• Era: Dreamcast
• Availability: Modern consoles and PC (Steam)
• (I'm having problems getting a video of this off the playstation, so you'll have to look it up on your own.)

This is widely renowned as one of the best shmups of all time and it exudes polish and quality, but to be honest it hasn't really clicked with me yet. I'll keep plinking away at it to see if I eventually get on its level, especially since it's the only one of these I have on the Playstation downstairs.

Anyway, it's based around this "polarity" gimmick where you can flip colors at will and absorb same-color bullets. Kind of reminiscent of Silhouette Mirage, but different.

Radiant Silvergun

• Developer: Treasure
• Era: Saturn
• Availability: Modern consoles and PC (Steam)
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

I knew this game by reputation as a teen, because it sat at an intersection of rarity and quality that commanded $500-$900 eBay prices (in 1999 dollars!! fuck!). Obviously I never played it back in the day.

This straight-up rules! Infuriatingly difficult, but really compelling. The quantity of bosses is astounding, and they're almost all at peak levels of Treasure setpiece outrageousness. I am not sure how to summarize that particular blend of mechanical inventiveness, visual opulence, narrative intensity, and total off-the-leash aggression if you haven't experienced it before, but it's Sure Extremely Something. My jaw literally dropped at least three times the first time I fought Penta in stage 4. What the fuck!!

I guess I'm also somewhat primed to like it because it's probably the game that ZeroRanger is most thoroughly in dialogue with, mechanically and aesthetically.

The default setup in a vertically scrolling shmup is that you have one or two forward fire modes and a limited panic bomb; you always want to be either directly under the enemy or en-route to there. ZeroRanger has no bomb, but gives you THREE fire modes in multiple directions (bound to separate buttons) and an alternate high-damage high-risk melee form, doled out over the course of the first three levels. This gives more options for routing your movement and covering the screen, and lets the designers keep you on your toes with shit like streams of enemies arriving from the flanks and rear.

Radiant Silvergun does that, but harder. It gives you SIX GUNS AND A KNIFE, and they're all available from the start of the first level. It's a dizzying extreme of maximalist design, and every piece of that kit is mandatory.

The game is also a little more story-rich than seems to be the norm, and I'm kind of fond of its little non-linear reveals.

Dimension Drive

• Developer: 2awesomestudio (an indie I haven't heard of before)
• Era: Present
• Availability: PC (via itch)
• (No video of this one.)

This rode in as a freebie in one of the big Itch charity bundles I've bought, so I gave it a try. (That’s also how I found ZeroRanger, btw!) The mechanical high-concept puts two lockstep-scrolling playfields side-by-side on the screen, and you can teleport between them to dodge obstacles or chase enemies. Pretty brain-bending!

I found it pretty fun, but way too chatty, so that's a useful baseline measurement for cutscene density in this style of game.

Didn't play this for very long, but I might come back to it.

Rainchaser (demo)

• Developer: Kornodd (an indie I haven't heard of before)
• Era: Present
• Availability: Unreleased (demo on Steam)
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

Learned about this from a playthrough video that youtube randomly decided to link me.

This is gorgeous, has a good soundtrack, and has some very fun action. I played it pretty heavily over the course of a week, trying to get good enough to clear the demo level on one continue. It's real promising! I'll be excited to play it when it comes out. I especially love the muted color palette and the machine designs.

Mechanically and stylistically, this seems to be borrowing several things from ZeroRanger. (That's actually a little tricky to be sure of, because ZR itself borrows and references so widely from the history of shmups and I'm not well-read enough to identify many of its sources. But I followed the dev back to their art gallery and found a packet of ZR fanart, so.) Specifically what I'm seeing are the three weapons bound to different buttons, the warning indicators when an enemy or laser is about to bust through the edge of the screen, and the checkpointed continues (about which more later). And also a story presentation built around mystery and gradual careful reveals.

The other big mechanical element is a dedicated focus-brake modifier button that slows your movement and concentrates your shot patterns for higher damage. Turns out this is probably borrowed from Touhou, but I didn't know that when I played this.

Cho Ren Sha 68k

• Developer: Famibe no Yosshin (a doujin guy mostly known for this game)
• Era: Antique PC (1990s)
• Availability: Emulation, or the alternate Windows version
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

doujin (adj., sorta): Loanword from Japanese that means something in the intersection of “self-published” and “amateur” (in the two-centuries-ago sense of “done for the love of it outside concerns of commerce,” rather than the this-century sense of “the opposite of expert”). Most commonly used as “doujinshi” (self-published comics; a significant fraction are fanfic, which the Japanese scene has complex conventions for the commercialization of), but you also hear “doujin soft” for artisanal video games released outside standard distribution channels, and it overlaps with “indie games” without being quite the same thing. (Well, plus “indie” doesn’t exactly mean anything anymore, but never mind that.)

A high-quality freeware game made for the Sharp X68000, an antique Japan-only non-DOS PC platform that had already reached the end of its lifecycle when this came out in 1995. Later there was a Windows port, but weirdly, the classic version is more recently updated, with a pass of polish tweaks done for inclusion in a recent retro console release. Anyway, I grabbed the X68k version and emulated it in Retroarch, which works great.

Sick music and sprite art, with what feels like an impressive amount of guys and detritus on-screen for the era. The mechanics are about as old-school as it gets: one kind of shot plus bomb, and punitive power loss on death.

Anyway, the shooting and dodging feel great, the presentation is fantastic, and it’s free, so if you can cope with getting an emulator running you should totally give it a try. Who doesn't love some good clean spaceship fun! Also, check out this high score entry screen music. Hell yeah, we love the E.A.R.T.H.! (The X68k platform always had FM synthesizer hardware, so its game music has a very particular flavor.)

Dodonpachi Daioujou

• Developer: CAVE
• Era: Early '00s
• Availability: Inscrutable arcade rom piracy... OR. There’s a Japan-only port for modern consoles done by M2 (!!!) that goes for like $60 on eBay and gods help me I am honestly considering it. 👀
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

Okay, so this is the point where we need to get Virgil on the phone and start talking about hell.

Bullet hell (n): Shmup subgenre characterized by ludicrous amounts of enemy bullets, laid out in complex interlocking patterns. To compensate and keep the game playable, the player's injurable "hitbox" is tiny (maybe 1/12 the size of their visible sprite), and the bullet speed is slower than in "traditional" shmups. Japanese synonym: danmaku (lit: bullet curtain, or something like that). Also apparently a synonym: manic shooter.

The boundary gets squishy, but I think that ZeroRanger and Radiant Silvergun and Cho Ren Sha are not bullet hells, even though they postdate that subgenre and take elements from it.

I hadn't really played any bullet hell games before, and based on watching a small amount of high-level play, they didn't really appeal — the core loop seemed more like navigating a maze than interacting with dynamic enemies, and I wasn't immediately sold. But I figured I'd better give it an honest try and see what it's all about, because it's such a large and distinct island in this archipelago. So I started with a game from CAVE, a developer that's nearly synonymous with the genre.

Well, first off, I was wrong about the structure of bullet hell; the whole flow is much more dynamic and interactive than I would have thought by just watching gameplay footage. You're doing a lot of proactive work to control crowds (or strategically grow them, if you're playing risky for score) and bait bullet flows in particular directions to keep your options open later. Actually, I found this document of principles for building one yourself surprisingly useful as a player, just for getting oriented and learning what to see.

Secondly, this game is magnificent. I'm extremely bad at it, but the presentation, polish, and coherent central vision holding it all together make me want to kick ass at it.

CAVE's main mechanical formula seems to be bomb plus two kinds of forward shot — a rapid wide shot if you tap fire, and a high-damage laser that slows your movement if you hold fire. This game adds onto that with a "hyper" mechanic, which I am not able to use safely but which feels fucking incredible when you uncork it. Imagine an airplane going Super Saiyan, basically.

By itself, this wasn't enough to clarify how I feel about bullet hell; it's beautiful, but it's an unrestrained game made for a small population of expert sicko connoisseurs, and the skill curve you have to clear before you can engage with it fluently is vertical. I needed more points of view.

Mushihimesama

• Developer: CAVE
• Era: Mid-00s
• Availability: PC (Steam)
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

This is one of CAVE's more obtainable releases, and I picked it up in part as indirect penance for scrounging the other game.

As it happens, its early difficulty curve is much more approachable than DDP DOJ, and its scoring system (at least in normal mode) is significantly less arcane. And the bug-centric wilderness setting makes for a much less oppressive atmosphere (at least if you're ok w/ bugs). I like this a lot, and can see myself playing it on the semi-regular.

Right, so here's something I actively dislike about both these games: the arcade-style continue pacing. They're designed as voracious quarter-eaters; you die a lot, and when you do, you can plunk in another coin and keep playing from where you went splat. But once you're in a home setting, this actually feels real bad. Since you never need to get through a given challenge in a single go, there's no natural, embedded mileposts for assessing your efforts to build skill, and I actually think that ends up disrespecting and discouraging novice players.

I think this is part of why the ideal of the one-credit clear ("1cc") became such a north star for shmup heads: using zero-setback continues doesn't reduce the challenge linearly, it reduces it exponentially, to a point where you don't feel like you're playing the game. To check if you've actually learned your stuff, you kinda have to go back to the start.

Some shmups that were born on home systems instead of the arcade handle continues in a more balanced way. For example, ZeroRanger has frequent mid-level checkpoints, and sends you back to the nearest one. This retains most of your progress, but it doesn't let you cheese your way past anything — you really do have to beat the Artypo mid-boss with two or three lives in order to keep going, and the game will test you on that. (And your continues are also capped per run, so if you're ramming your head against one boss repeatedly, it enforces a change of scenery eventually.) The Rainchaser demo works identically. And Touhou 10, which I'll get to in just a sec, has unlimited continues but kicks you back to the start of the level, which I also consider totally reasonable.

Anyway, perverse incentives like maximizing coin revenue per unit of floor space can result in annoying outcomes, I'm sure you're all scandalized.

Touhou 10: Mountain of Faith

• Developer: Team Shanghai Alice / ZUN (a venerable one-person doujin shop who does This)
• Era: Mid-00s
• Availability: PC (Steam)
• 📺 Here's what it looks like

And this was where I decided that actually bullet hell was for me.

Which was not my expected result! Either in general, or specifically from a Touhou game.

This is a series I've been aware of for a long while — its characters and artifacts always pop up in random places (like, you know that "Bad Apple" shadow puppet video that always propagates to strange display surfaces?), and the fandom seems to overlap with the Vocaloid enthusiasts. It's also an especially productive fandom, because the creator has unusually laid-back rules about people selling their own works using his characters and setting.

Capsule review: Touhou Luna Nights

Actually, wait, a while back I played a non-shmup metroidvania called Luna Nights that turned out to be a Touhou fangame. It looks like I never reviewed it, so here: I thought the story and characters were nonsensical fluff, but the art, music, gameplay, and polish were stellar. It was recommended to me as a watertight Symphony-of-the-Nightalike built around two interlocking time-control mechanics, and it delivered exactly that. Give it a shot if you like backtracking, double-jumps, and lush sprite art.

Where was I? Right, anyway, I was aware of Touhou, but I wasn't previously haunting the bullet hell markets, and the main affect of the characters and setting seemed to be a sort of, uh, chaste anime yearning that very much did not call my name.

Joke's on me, though, because it turns out the actual shooting-and-dodging action is tense, precise, legible, and addictive, and the soundtrack is some classic videogame-y jams (uptempo and exciting, with a particular penchant for synth horns). The bullet patterns are varied and exciting, but the difficulty curve is juuuust gradual enough to start teaching you how to see paths through them before things really go ape on you. This game rules, and I'm fully hooked.

Here's some things I especially like about it:

• Non-cheesy continues. I already mentioned this above, but having to beat a whole level in one go gives me a much better intuition for how much I'm improving.
• It has a slow-and-focus mechanic, but it uses the dedicated brake modifier button I first saw in Rainchaser rather than the hold-fire input from the CAVE games. I like this better, because it lets me brake on a dime instead of having to wait for the hold to register. (I mean, hold feels good too, but it's harder to control the timing and so I die more.)
• It kinda-sorta makes bullet patterns into characters in their own right? Each boss has a number of "spell card" special attack patterns that they cycle through, and each one has its own name and its own distinct character. I think this helps with making the attack modes legible and learnable, and it also just feels extra badass when you ace one — you get a bonus if you drain the boss's health enough to end a spell card without getting hit by it, and there's a tiny little stat display showing how often this particular pattern has fucked you up. IDK, it's a bold design choice but I think it has a lot going for it; it's cool how it structures tough fights into distinct achievable units.
• Pickups are continuous instead of chunky. I don't know that this would work for every game, but it's nice here: instead of a small number of big powerups that raise your shot power by a whole level, there's tons of small powerups that raise your shot power by a fraction. So... missing one doesn't feel bad! It's fine! There'll be more in a sec.
• Related to the blizzard of power and score pickups: there's an invisible line near the top of the field (AKA the scariest place to be), and if you cross it, it automatically collects all the pickups currently on screen. This is a satisfying little risky reward mechanic, once you've learned a zone enough to start taking chances.

• Bombs aren't a distinct currency! OK, so I know they're traditional, but I suck at using bombs and I kind of hate them. I always feel like I don't have enough to waste on encounters that I've squeaked through previously, and I never remember to pop one when I'm cornered; it's hard to build a reflex for an action that requires a resource check first! I love when a shmup doesn't have bombs, like ZeroRanger. That said, if there's gotta be a bomb mechanic, I prefer when it's more like a cooldown ability than a scarce resource. Radiant Silvergun's hyper sword worked like this; you can only hold one charge, and you usually fire it soon after it's ready, especially because dying resets the meter.

  And in Touhou 10, they're linked to your shot-power pickups — popping a bomb burns one level of your shot power. This is decent, mostly because of what I mentioned above: you're constantly collecting power fragments, so you don't need to worry about bomb famine like you would if there's only one per level. It's still a trade-off, but it's a much shorter-term one; you're basically taking out a 45 second loan to avoid a kill. It changes the math enough to discourage hoarding and let you skip the hard resource-check. Also, your shot power stops improving at level 4 but is capped at level 5, so you've often got a free bomb to fuck around with. ...So now I just need to actually train that fucking reflex.

• Cool and fun shot options. You lock in to a single style of shot+focus when you start a run, but there's six choices, so lots of variety across runs. Once I can clear normal mode with the basic forward shot, I want to mess with the one where your focus mode gets wider, that's wild.

Anyway, this game is much scrappier and less polished than the CAVE games, but for exactly that reason, I find it really inspiring. ZUN has some real talent and hard-won skill, but he also makes good choices about where to spend the most effort for the most reward, and I want to study those trade-offs.

I'm glad I finally tried a Touhou! Their popularity is well-earned. Someday very soon I will successfully get past that tengu girl.

In Conclusion

Play ZeroRanger, because it's probably still the best "gateway shmup" to show newcomers what that world has to offer. But many of these other games also rule, and I'm having a great time exploring them.