DoDonPachi (1997, Cave)
Legend has it that, having last programmed the screamingly fast-paced technical marvel Recca for the Famicom in 1992, Shinobu Yagawa had played DonPachi upon its release in 1995 and, having been impressed by its then-large enemy bullet count, decided that he wanted his first arcade STG, 1996's Battle Garegga, to be able to have twice as many bullets on-screen. Tsuneki Ikeda, in response, programmed DoDonPachi, released in 1997, with the intent of being able to have twice as many bullets as Garegga. This friendly rivalry between the two programmers wouldn't continue for very long, as by the time Cave moved to new hardware capable of pumping out even more onscreen sprites with 2001's DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou, Raizing had for the most part ceased its production of STGs.
The bullet count arms race began a few years before DonPachi, however. Ikeda desired to increase the amount of enemy fire to accentuate the joy of dodging with his first known project, Toaplan's V-V, in 1993, and even before then 1992's Tatsujin Ou upped the number of bullets while slowing down their speed, however lacking the proper balance to the player's hitbox size required to make it truly satisfying. The object here is to intimidate and look impressive, while not increasing the actual difficulty beyond a game with simpler, sparser patterns (in some cases being quite a bit easier). So we see a gradual shrinking of hitbox size, starting with V-V, on through Batsugun, then Batsugun Special, then DonPachi. As the player's susceptibility to being hit decreases and the amount and slowness of enemy fire increases, there enters a kind of leniency that doesn't exist in older STGs with larger, faster bullets. Sometimes, luck will have it, you get to hail mary through a cloud of bullets unscathed.
The size and coverage of the player's firepower had already more or less peaked: 1988's Tatsujin featured a screen-filling blue laser weapon, and 1989's Same! Same! Same! had its massive blue shot fan and undulating six stream flame shot. The visual flashiness of the player's weaponry would also increase to near-maximum levels with Batsugun's Type-B ship and its dual straight and homing lasers covering every possible area of the screen. Aim, in the STG it would seem, was taking a back seat in many iterations of the genre to the basic enjoyment of taking down large armies at a stroke. The only way to go from here, while maintaining the simplicity of the form, is to up the enemy's firepower as well. We see here a gradual consolidation of the base impulses one feels while playing an STG: to shoot, and to dodge.
Streamlining of other mechanics followed apace, with V-V limiting the number of game loops to 2 down from the infinite loops of earlier Toaplan titles, a structural modification that was with few exceptions preserved over the next handful of Ikeda's games, and for several in the future. Batsugun removed weapon item pickups in favor of different ship types with different speeds and weaponry. DonPachi, then, directly and inversely correlated ship speed and main shot width across its three ship types, in a stroke of pure logic. In addition, it added a laser weapon for all three ships, partially doing away with the necessity of point blanking with your main shot present in earlier titles by now including an ever-present weapon that is both purely focused and long distance. That your ship slows down while doing so signposts its increased power brilliantly. Finally, DonPachi's inclusion of a simple yet sophisticated scoring system in the form of making large piecemeal chains of groups of enemies adds a new layer of achievement onto a game much more limited in length than its distant predecessors. The stage was thus set for the genre to reach its zenith.
DoDonPachi, upon selecting your ship and weapon type, immediately sends a fleet of tanks your way the size of which would be seldom seen until the latter stages of its direct predecessor, wailing guitars announcing your arrival in the distance. Some flying zako swoop in over them. They're all firing relentlessly at you before you mow them down en masse with your shot or laser, perhaps with the studied rhythm of an experienced chaining superplayer, while an even larger army awaits upscreen. This is the modern STG making its triumphant debut. The enemy count indeed has increased greatly in premeditated proportion to the game's overall greatly increased bullet capacity; the small fries fire single aimed bullets with wild abandon and the tankier dudes will set off fireworks of bullets of all sizes and shapes and colors in all different directions. If one hasn't seen a danmaku shooting game before, as the first players of this game had not, it's a sight to behold and never forget. The future of STG was first seen here. The game never even feels particularly cluttered visually until, appropriately, its penultimate stage where the volume is jacked up to a new level and the final stage where the sheer variety of bullet types and the directions they fly in goes into overdrive.
Setting its main spectacle aside, the character and background art are all expertly handcrafted in pixels in the tradition of the games that came before it; only a few games later would Cave's output be largely painted-over prerendered 3D models that, while still generally appealing, would look just slightly cheaper by comparison. DDP borrows liberally from Tatsujin Ou's style here, as for example many players have noted how similar the former's stage 5 background looks to the latter's stage 2 background, and this extends to the character art and even select bullet patterns as well (T-Ou's stage 4 boss and DDP's stage 6 boss). Because when it comes to aesthetics, why not borrow from the best? Like DonPachi before it, DDP melds the two preeminent shooting game themes of military and sci-fi into a very cool and original whole while upping the ante in detail, giving the game a luster of precision balance that resides not only in its mechanics, but in its visual character.
The game features the same three ship types as DonPachi, this time adding two sub-types for each one; the shot type emphasizes the main shot's power so as to more efficiently obliterate large groups of zako while the laser type buffs the laser into a figurative precision-crafted sword that slices right through small guys without stopping and makes shorter work of big guys. With the stratification of player weapon preference and style into ship types running from narrow shot but fast speed to wide shot but slow speed already having taken place, we now have what can be summed up as an additional question posed by the game to the player: Do you want stages to be easier, or bosses to be easier? Even further, the laser type ship moves faster while lasering which is a boon for chaining from a large enemy to something else, while its weaker shot will take down zako at a slower pace, again good for maintaining your rhythm for chaining purposes. So one could say that the shot type ship is for survival while the laser type ship is for scoring, but it's not quite as simple as that. Many superplayers favor the shot type, even the world record for the Type-C ship, as of this writing, was performed with its shot variant. The point is, this simple new option for each ship greatly affects how the player approaches every stage in strategically interesting ways both obvious and subtle.
In the original DonPachi, the pace of the action was a bit, shall we say, sluggish. It feels like it takes forever for more than 3-5 enemies to be on screen at once when the game begins, which is an odd backpedal from Ikeda's previous game, Batsugun, which zooms on by in both pacing and length. However, DonPachi was a bit longer and had two full loops with a True Last Boss and felt like a journey more akin to older Toaplan titles than Batsugun, which is a little on the short side, with its original version lasting around 15 minutes in total. With DDP we get the best of both worlds. Beyond the brief introductory stage we get five more beefy, setpiece-packed ones brimming with interesting stuff to shoot. The general structure and length of DonPachi has been combined with the pacing of Batsugun, setting in stone the kind of satisfying experience that Cave would aim to replicate for many of its games to come.
The gimmicky revenge bullets mechanic in DonPachi's second loop, in which any explosion releases a swath of aimed bullets that forces the player to consider what to shoot and when as to not trap themselves in a wall of death, is thankfully absent in DoDonPachi's. Instead, they just doubled the number of bullets shot by the enemy! It's a completely simple and obvious solution as to how to make the game harder for those who are skilled enough to reach this second loop (there are requirements one must adhere to, otherwise the game ends after the first round). Once again we see Cave's strict adherence to the philosophy of sticking to the STG's essentials while pushing the genre forward. Additionally, there is the True Last Boss Hibachi waiting at the end of the second loop, and the game; a tiny little bee that dances around the top of the screen spewing the maximum amount of bullets possible for the hardware in several engaging patterns. The most interesting quirk of this TLB is its bomb shield, that is, if the player bombs then Hibachi will throw up a shield to protect himself from any further damage until the bomb is completely gone. This brutal addition effectively adds another loop's worth of difficulty to the game. Let me explain: to clear the second loop's stage 6 boss, i.e. to even reach Hibachi in the first place, one will almost certainly need to clear the first loop with most, if not all, of their lives intact. Hibachi's incredible bullet spam and bomb shield ensures that all but the best of the best players will need to have gotten through the second loop of the game with most of their lives intact, as he will drain all of your resources through attrition. DoDonPachi, without even getting into its scoring system, already provides incredible depth through survival play alone.
However! There is a scoring system, and much like basically everything else in the game, it's a pristine refinement of what the previous game brought to the table. It's now much more lenient, and possesses a different flavor from DonPachi, in which you must stake out particular sections of stages, wait for the screen to fill with the requisite amount of enemies, and then destroy them all as fast as possible, leaving very little gap between them; from doing this you make several large but separate chains within each stage. In this way, the whole of chaining is very unnatural, separate from the primary game of just shooting things as they appear. The added freedom of DoDonPachi's chaining system, wherein the continued life of your hit combo is now dictated by a meter that fills as you destroy things and drains while you're not at least holding your laser on something, adds a kind of natural progression from survival to chaining. In the latter half of the game you can make 200-300 hit combos just by surviving and not bombing, and often enough the best chaining route is also probably the best survival route. The only mildly arbitrary element of all this is finding the links between these large chains, so that you can create much bigger chains that span the whole stage and, chains being exponential to the increase of your score, are worth huge points. Though large chains can occur with proficient survival there is strict memorization involved in performing truly optimized chaining routes, which again develop naturally from those primitive survival routes. Much in the same way older infinite-looping checkpoint-based STGs would force you to learn powered down checkpoint recoveries in order to be able to marathon the game because you needed to be prepared to slip up and die at any moment over many hours of play, DDP provides the same kind of strictness in a much more compact, elegant form in its rigorous requirements for truly high scores. The attitude toward player improvement of the old STG is in the new, residing now in its scoring system.
And as much as I trumpet the massively successful consolidation of the positive results of varied experiments of old into the ultrarefined new, a novice player need not care one iota about the second loop, the TLB, or the scoring system. DDP is just as balanced in a basic, pure-survival 1CC of the first loop as in any other aspect of its design, which is something Cave would get wrong in various ways over the remainder of their output. The bombs are plentiful, the 1ups accessible, and the bullet count, while perhaps intimidating, is well enough balanced against the ship's small hitbox that a new player will come to understand quickly what their limits are with regards to their ability to dodge dense patterns. The game was praised on release as something very approachable by beginner players, and is a popular choice for a first 1CC; anyone should be able to see the end of the first loop of the game within 10-20 hours of play. And when they have, there are, as I have at length described, near-infinite depths within waiting to be dived into.
In 1997, Cave created a new subgenre. In 1997, Cave also perfected a genre. With Ikeda's declaration, back in the days of his first known release V-V, that the fun of a shooting game is in its shooting and dodging, thus justifying that game's inclusion of built-in autofire and increased number of bullets, his game design was then distilled and distilled again until the pure essence showed through, in DoDonPachi. DDP has nothing more, and nothing less, than it needs to provide absolutely everything good and exciting that the STG is capable of. Its neutrality yet undeniable stylishness of theme, its structure and difficulty that both invites newcomers and satisfies the hardest of cores, and its giving the player enough choice in how to play it without overloading the inherently simplistic form of an STG, all work together to provide an experience that is broadly, yet maximally, enjoyable. All the notes are flawlessly hit.
We can compare, for example, its scoring system's natural progression from survival into chaining with Cave's 1998 disco-themed release Dangun Feveron, in which its scoring system where you collect little men drifting in space, newly freed from their alien captors you just destroyed, has a comfortably diagetic reason to exist rather than your score going up simply for doing some arbitrary extra action. However, it falls short in the light of DDP's chaining for the fact that it must be engaged with in some way; one cannot completely ignore the visual clutter of these discomen or the discordant noise that plays whenever one should leave the screen. Here even when ignoring the scoring system, you can't ignore it. The inexorable presence of large amounts of items that exist purely for scoring purposes complicates the essential qualities of STG so carefully crystallized in DDP. Similarly in DDP's own sequel, DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou, "Hyper" items that do little more than increase your chain and make the game harder will float lazily down and back up the screen. You have to deal with these in some way; even if you don't want them at all you have to dodge them, much like an unwanted weapon item from older Toaplan titles. Ketsui, Mushihimesama and its sequel, Futari, would introduce if not always visually noisy, at least insanely arbitrary scoring systems that are tanatamount to totally separate minigames layered on top of the regular game. The problem of overcomplication would become present graphically outside of scoring systems as well: Bullet counts and visual flair increased almost across the board in future titles to the point where we have a game like DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu, in which there's so many neon flashing bullets and gigantic lasers on the screen at all times that you start to wonder why they even bothered drawing backgrounds. DoDonPachi resides in kind of a Goldilocks zone of the shooting game lineage: Donpachi is too cold. Dai-Ou-Jou and Daifukkatsu, in their own ways, too hot. DoDonPachi is just right.
Final rating: 5/5 (Great)