How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the TLB

I don't think I shared this in my original review, but there was one specific moment in the game ZeroRanger where I went from "rather intent on it" to "full werewolf:" the part where the true last boss deletes your fucking save file.

This is one of the most brilliant pieces of polemical or instructive game design that I've ever encountered. I think it's at the core of why this one particular game has such a startling track record on getting people Into Shmups, but it might take a minute to explain why.

Asceticism, Meaning, and Exactly 25¢

The baseline challenge in a shmup* is to finish the game in one sitting with fixed resources, and a crucial element of this challenge is that you can fail, ending the run and losing your progress.

* shmup, shoot-em-up, STG, or shooting game: synonyms for a genre of 2D action games built around shooting waves of targets while dodging waves of projectiles.

What does "fixed resources" mean? Well, friend, let's not mince words: it means a "1cc" (one-credit clear) — finish the whole thing without ever losing your last life and continuing.

Arcades automatically encouraged resource conservation by costing real coins: of course you want to get the most out of your quarter, so you'll instinctively start reaching for perfection. Home games use other means:

Limited stock of continues (Devil Blade Reboot)
Continuing sets you back to a distant checkpoint, so you're forced to complete some amount of the game with fixed resources and can learn to string together longer segments (Touhou 10)
The narrative urges you to avoid continues with a bad ending or something (Touhou 10)
Clear modal distinction between unrestricted practice and serious runs (Blue Revolver)

All these options are trying to thread this narrow gap where they can be fair to the consumer (by letting you play) while still being ruthless to the player (by demanding excellence). Because that ruthlessness is the point! The meaning of these games lies in the drama of potential failure.

All this is why faithful arcade ports basically don't independently make sense. Players must be taught about all this from somewhere outside the game in order to discover the "real" game and seek a 1cc. Most arcade games will let you quarter-plug your way to completion, but it's effectively a practice mode where you pay rent for hogging the cabinet; if you do that at home, it's not actually the game.

Detours, Meta-Progression, and Non-Fixed Resources

Arcade-style rigor is considered archaic, but I think the current aesthetic zeitgeist actually includes a taste for failure — consider the popularity of the "soulslike" and "roguelike" genre clusters, which are entirely built around the allure of failure.

The difference is, there's not a lot of tolerance anymore for hard skill-check walls that block the rest of the game until you overcome them. So the modern approach is to give the player something else to accomplish while they're stuck on something. In a soulslike with RPG systems, you can wander off and acquire more resources for your current run (stats, equipment, abilities, consumables); in a roguelike, there's typically a system of meta-progression, where failed runs unlock new resources for future runs (plus you might just get luckier gear on a re-roll).*

But notice how that changes the drama of failure: by abandoning fixed resources, neither approach can deliver that classic experience of watching a single distant star get closer through skill alone. On the other hand, if you do want to offer that experience, you'll alienate a lot of players. It's a pinch.

* (Actually, the evolution of the roguelike category is instructive: the old dungeon crawlers like Rogue and its resemblers were essentially arcadian with no progression across runs, and the earliest games that added such systems got dubbed "rogueLITE" by contemporary writers; nowadays, meta-progression is practically de rigeur.)

The Bait-and-Switch

Since System Erasure wanted ZeroRanger to invite new players into STGs, they read the room and added some meta-progression. (It's the milk and sugar to the black coffee of failure, you know?) You start out with only one chance, but scoring points unlocks up to eight continues ($2!).

Those extra resources propel you to the late game much faster than skill alone would, but the gradual unlocking and the hard cap shows you that the game does want skill. You can also start at any level you've previously reached, so you don't have to survive from the beginning just to practice what you're stuck on. The game's still very challenging, but with those extra tools and some perseverance, you have a decent chance at defeating Despair (who is very obviously the final boss).

If you do, the game asks if you want to attempt something risky... and it warns you that you only have one chance.

The shmup name for what's about to happen to you is a "true last boss," or "TLB" — an extreme challenge that's only offered when certain conditions are met. This one is dramatic and disorienting. If you accept, your unused continues are converted into individual lives, then you're thrown into an encounter that flips the game on its head; no ship, no weapons, and you must directly touch your opponent to win. The music and visuals are apocalyptic, and it's overlaid with an ominous narration that ties together the remaining loose ends of the plot; all told, you are tilted, stressed out, and definitely about to die.

And if you die... the game wasn't bluffing! It deletes your progress and plays the same cutscene you saw the first time you started the game — a mysterious confrontation, now recontextualized as your moment of failure.

Your next run ends as soon as you run out of lives; no continues. You can't stage-select to the last level anymore. Your hard-won resources are gone. Except, hold on a sec,

...you actually got pretty far on that single credit?? And... isn't that score-based progression meter filling up really fast this time around? Are we back up to three continues already after only one run??

The game has just shown you that the meta-progression was fake all along. The actual progression you've been making was all skill and knowledge, and you still have it. What's happening to you right now is a progress check, to show you first-hand how far you can currently get on limited resources before the game sets you loose again with a pocket full of credits.

The Initiation

The genius of temporarily destroying your resources is that it guides an uninitiated player onto the same path that a hardened shmup player would take: do a quarter-plugging casual run to just see the entire game and get the lay of the land, then get serious and learn to advance with constrained resources. Using only narrative and internal mechanics, it directly teaches an ethos and a method that most other shmups expect you to learn outside the game, and it ties it all to the emotional core of the story you've been following.

And!!! Converting whole credits into single lives for the TLB really locks in that whole lesson! It shows you that unspent continues are much more precious than you thought, and you want to spend as few as possible through the parts of the game that you're already familiar with. You're already training for your 1cc.

Anyway, that's why I'm hard-core now lmao.

Roadrunner Twice