天下制覇

It wasn’t an alien, it was a chimera. Clearly.

My initial thought is that I’m sad that the time has come when Zun has produced something that my laptop cannot handle. It actually runs pretty well for the first three stages, then things go to hell in a handbasket. Danmakufu has the same memory usage issues when you start throwing in tons of curved lasers and have more than about 10 objects to keep track of at once as well. I can’t say that I’m much of a fan of most of the new character designs, although given that Murasa and Nue have almost identical hair, I think Zun’s starting to run on empty. I will note that I had the exact idea for Captain Murasa’s attacks back when I toyed around with Danmakufu a lot, only with a swinging mace instead of giant anchors. I could never get the inertia quite right, although to be fair to myself, Zun didn’t even really try there.

In any case, for the most part, I like it quite a bit more than the last couple entries. It’s significantly easier than either of them and if the jinky framerate hadn’t run me into death a few times, I think I would have at least come witihin a hair’s breadth of 1CCing it on Normal during my first run. I’m still really not sold on the UFO mechanics though. The screen is crowded enough without flashing UFOs flying at you that you’re not supposed to be dodging. It also highly promotes a good deal of route memorization to get into a good groove of when to grab the things on later stages to keep the screen cleared. Unlike stages 1-3, stages 4 and 5 typically have three or four of the damn things bouncing around the entire time.