Progear no Arashi by Capcom and Cave?

[To Far Away Times]

With regard to the two scoring systems, the reason I was comparing them is that they both involve the player building up to a bullet cancel that helps with both score are survival. I guess Deathsmiles has this too... CAVE essentially reiterates on the same (very good) game over and over again anyway. Even their hori's don't feel all that different than their vert's.

While Akai Katana's system takes some effort to learn, I'd argue it has the best visual feedback of any scoring system I've ever come across. Launching those katanas is incredibly satisfying.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Shin Mode's katana mechanic is definitely fun to play with. The way the katana's slowly stab into enemies while showering out points is very satisfying, and they do kind of resemble the way Progear's bomb will slowly drill into enemies before exploding, albeit Progear's bombs REALLY hurt your score whereas it's a primary scoring mechanic for AK Shin/Slash.

[Lethe]

The Progear bomb is one of those cool throwaway ideas that's not mechanically relevant or expanded on. It's practically a blueprint for 90s Cave games: take one good central idea, fully develop that so it works well, then throw in lots of random half-baked shit that's nevertheless memorable and won't interfere with the core. I'm convinced that process was a big part of their success.

E: yes Progear is a "90s Cave game", it's the last one

[Some-Mist]

While Akai Katana's system takes some effort to learn, I'd argue it has the best visual feedback of any scoring system I've ever come across. Launching those katanas is incredibly satisfying.

100%

[Necronom]

While Akai Katana's system takes some effort to learn, I'd argue it has the best visual feedback of any scoring system I've ever come across. Launching those katanas is incredibly satisfying.

100%

Yup, Akai's Shin/Slash Mode never gets old. It's also worth mentioning that Aka to Blue shares a very similar though simplified mechanic.
It's more of a Hadouken here but it rips through bullets and enemies nearly as satisfying!

[bcass]

The Progear bomb is one of those cool throwaway ideas that's not mechanically relevant

Having recently cleared the game, I disagree with this. The bomb helps a LOT if you have it powered-up as it lasts a lot longer, which can be a god-send on certain boss attacks as you are invulnerable while the bomb is active. This is especially pertinent on the final boss. For me, that qualifies it as "mechanically relevant".

[Jonpachi]

The Progear bomb is one of those cool throwaway ideas that's not mechanically relevant

Having recently cleared the game, I disagree with this. The bomb helps a LOT if you have it powered-up as it lasts a lot longer, which can be a god-send on certain boss attacks as you are invulnerable while the bomb is active. This is especially pertinent on the final boss. For me, that qualifies it as "mechanically relevant".

As you get deeper into the score system, you'll find though that your "powered-up" bomb is really just exhausting your gem supply, thus heavily damaging your ability to score well. It's a very punishing system, where you cannot rely on a bomb here-and-there and still maintain your overall score progress like you can in many games. I'd then agree that it's a bit of a shitty design, as it's something that looks and feels GREAT to the player at first, but is in fact quite anti-fun in its function.

[bcass]

Yes, I'm well aware of the score penalty. I was purely referring to survival, and in that context, it's "mechanically relevant".

[Lethe]

"Not mechanically relevant" was a bad turn of phrase. Some of these things are very mechanically relevant, they just don't have a meaningful relationship with the core design. A better description might be "non-robust". Some other really blatant examples are the ESPrade capacity clear bonus (serendipitously helped by the 2P bomb-chain behavior), or the Guwange parts-milking style that shows up on 2 bosses but none of the others, or even DDP stage 6 which is just MAXIMUM XTREME crap everywhere to facilitate chaining and let the player figure it out. There's an element of playful creativity to including these things which I think is much less obvious in DOJ onward, where Cave seemed to become more focused on the "serious" implications of what they were doing.

Or maybe I'm talking complete shit because DFK and Futari 1.0 managed to get released.

[Radiance Alesta]

Progear is definitely one of my favs! The game has some good style and gameplay, and in my opinion, when Cave peaked in the genre. The scoring is pretty good too, I wish more games took note of it.