Sol Cresta (PlayStation 4|5 - Nintendo Switch - PC)

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Sturmvogel Prime
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Sol Cresta (PlayStation 4|5 - Nintendo Switch - PC)

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DANGER ZONE (PART XXXIV)
SAVE THE SUN




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The Blazing Battle of the Sun begins!

The Cresta series, classic shmups which became pretty innovative due to the use of formations that allowed the player to split the ship in parts to cover a wider space on the screen in order to take down the enemies. While all the Cresta series were vertical, only Terra Cresta 3D was the lone instance where the format differed from the tradition in order to embrace the 3D graphics. Who could imagine that in the 2020's we would get another chapter, the closing chapter of the Cresta series.



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Welcome to the Decepticon Neighborhood, formerly known as Solar System.

Before starting the game, you can select which planet you want to start playing, but for unlock this Stage Select feature, you have to clear the stages. This saves time for those who want to complete the game despite getting Game Overs in their previous sessions.



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Sol Cresta™ comes with the three components of the Yamato ship.
Other ships are sold separately. New from Mattel®.


Like Raiden IV, you can select which ship you want to use, if you bought the DLC's to get them, giving you a total of four ships to play with. The default ship, Yamato, the CR47 from Moon Cresta and both Wing Galibers from Terra Cresta and Terra Cresta II, they have different formation and attack patterns based on their respective games, and as an enhancement, the CR47 now has a Firebird Attack.



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Split up, line up, take'em down.

The major feature of Sol Cresta is the perfection of the ship "Formation" concept. In Terra Cresta, this was used to vastly increase the player's offensive capabilities as the ship could split in components with varied attacks, but acting as a "Bomb Format" since you can do that as long as you had Formation powerups in stock. In Sol Cresta, you can split your ship at anytime you want and without any cost. For the sake of rearrangement, the game enters in a slowdown time so you can rearrange the ship's formation for the sake of switching weapons. Switching ship positions will determine how the Yamato will work, but I'll explain you how this ship works.
Unit 01 "AMATERASU" (Red): This is the fast firing component. Fires a three way spread laser fire. It's very effective against red shields and ice obstacles.
Unit 02 "TSUKUYOMI" (Blue): The homing type part. It's main weapon fires homing missiles that lock onto enemies. While the homing capability is very basic and quite weak, except against metal-drone types.
Unit 03 "SUSANO" (Yellow): The power type module. Fires drills that pierce through some obstacles and enemies alike. This weapon is good against barriers, rock obstacles and even asteroids.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the mentioned weapons can only be used when there's at least two ships combined, otherwise you'll be using a basic twin pea-shooter regardless of which Unit you're using.

Rearranging the ship in different modes will change the main weapon, charge beam and even sub-shot. This time, you are now allowed to have a Charge Shot when you don't need to perform a Formation Attack and still want to inflict heavy damages to the enemies.

Triple Mode 1: UNIT 01>UNIT 02>UNIT 03 - The "default" configuration of the Yamato. Amaterasu will provide the spread shot as the main weapon, Tsukuyomi will fire a volley of missiles as the Charge Shot, and Susano will be the Sub-shot with a double drill shot.
Triple Mode 2: UNIT 01>UNIT 03>UNIT 02 - Like the previous one, you'll have the laser fire, but the charged shot will be the Gigadrill, a giant short ranged drill that can destroy bullets, The homing missiles will be backing you up as the Sub-shot.
Triple Mode 3: UNIT 02>UNIT 01>UNIT 03 - Your main weapon will be the fast firing homing missiles, with the "Murderbeam" of Amaterasu as the Charge Shot, backed up with the slow fire rated drills.
Triple Mode 4: UNIT 02>UNIT 03>UNIT 01 - The main weapon is the same as the previous mode, but with the Gigadrill as the charged shot and a basic twin laser from Amaterasu as the Sub-shot.
Triple Mode 5: UNIT 03>UNIT 01>UNIT 02 - You will be firing drills at a fast rate of fire, having the red beam for Charge shot while backed up with slow fire rated homing missiles.
Triple Mode 6: UNIT 03>UNIT 02>UNIT 01 - Same as above: Fast drills, but with the charged homing missile volley backed up with red twin lasers.

As we've noticed, Sol Cresta's major feature is how vast the concept of Formation is. But along with rearranging the ship formation for its main weapon, what really counts is that you can perform a plethora of Formation Attacks aligning the split ships in different positions unlike its predecessors. Based on Terra Cresta, you can perform basic two ship formations, while having the three components of your ship (or five if you have the Wing Galibers) will allow you to use more formations, but you can no longer perform two-ship formations in the process. Each formation will trigger a specific attack like the Moon Formation (all two/three ships in horizontal line) which fires crescent shaped shots from the front and from behind, being the Firebird Attack the most important of all. But to do the formations you need "Formation Chips" which are obtained by either destroying enemies or containers. You can change the obtained Chip by shooting at it just like the bells on Twinbee and Parodius, however, if you get the same chip again you'll get 1,000 points as a bonus. Getting used to the mechanics is required in this game, not an option you can avoid. Using Formation attacks aren't just for the sake of having special weaponry, they're also the key to obtain Sol Medals and obtain additional bonuses as you fill the Sol Gauge, which will be granting you from bonus points and additional Formation Gauges to 1ups and Shield Points. While in the previous Cresta games you died in one hit, now you can carry Shield Points acting as a life bar, giving you far more chances of making progress in your mission.



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Basic Street Fighter knowledge is required.

Ok... Down, Up or Up, Down and Shot for Machine Gun shot, the Hadoken input and 360 rotation of the analog stick for Side and Burst Shot, it makes me think Hamster and PlatinumGames tried to do something in the style of the "Trick Shot" from Seta's Twin Eagle II: The Rescue Mission as we have additional skills that provide cover fire on the sides and even from behind. While it sounds complex, you'll be ocassionally doing most of them, being the full 360° one of them. You have to do a full 360° stick/pad rotation just like Liu-Kang's Fatality from the first Mortal Kombat. Who could imagine that something like fighting game moves would work on a shmup? Sounds crazy but actually it works.



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Going "Shmuptroid" on the switches.

While the concept of the formations are well received, and the concept of "This weapon is strong against certain enemy type" like Megaman X and Pokemon ("It's super effective!", remember?), can't say the same of some of the in-game situations. Using the formation change as an excuse, the game will throw you switches that will require you to change the firing component of the ship to open it. That will also apply to the containers carrying Shields or Formation Chips. I can understand the element switching in games like Super Metroid and CrossCode because they're part of the puzzle challenge in order to open a hidden door or find a special item, but in those game it was much easier to do the switch 'cos you weren't caught in the middle of a crossfire. There's also ring which will also require to switch formations in order to get bonus points, can be tricky, but in contrast to the switches and crates, the ring bonus is actually fun to play (learn from that, Superman 64!) There's also gates with a specific color, while you can destroy them with any weapon, shooting them with the indicated color will grant you bonus points. The whole game is based on secret bonuses that will require formations and other things to do, inviting the player to keep playing the game constantly in order to find all of them, something that's quite rare to see nowadays since present day games are more "commercial" and only want your money rather than the replay value.

My only complain is how annoying the difficulty could get. In the last levels of the game, the stage hazards will become a little frustrating as you'll be navigating through scrolling blocks and beam obstacles that you have to avoid by getting cover on blocks. Having them once in a while is good enough for the sake of challenging, but I think this time they've exceeded a little bit, but not as much as the infamous Gradius III. On the other side, boss battles are interesting and they take a considerable amount of time as they're behemoths capable of take plenty of damage before dying, the best example is the Trimurti which can take more than two Phoenix "Firebird Attacks" from the Yamato and still fight as if nothing happened, and boss battles are not just the throw you a few bullets and then a beam, We're talking multi-screened space cruisers, massive robots, Gunvolt-like dash attacks and even hard-to-predict laser beams that (if you're careless) could put an end to the game.



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Blind spots and predicting the apparently unpredictable death-beams.

HINT: Sol Mandler's murderbeams seems to be unpredictable, but here's a couple of tricks that might give you a hand during the battle.
On the first form, Sol Mandler fires the yellow beam in an angle, while the inclination is completely random, you can move up to the left or right avoiding the line of fire completely. After taking some damage, Sol Mandler will change its attack to four death-beams that are also fired at random angles, but this time you can predict them. Before firing, you can see thin lines of energy "aiming" outside of the energy ball, those are the indicators of where the beams will fire.

If the last levels involved constant formation change and annoying obstacle navigations that rivaled the arcade version of Gradius III, the "Extra Stage" is just even worse. Its absurd difficulty will match the arcade version of Gradius III. Think about combining a speed zone with obstacle navigation, laser dodging and Salamander-styled shutting gates. Also, if you lose lives, you'll be penalized 1,000 points per ship. To put it simple, if you don't have 7 or 8 spare lives, consider your game already over. Speaking of Game Overs, if you continue the game, your score will be resetted to 1 point "a la Capcom", curiously, when you're on the continue screen you can tap the X button to obtain more credits while pressing Options acts as the Start button. If you decide not to continue or if you finish the game with a high enough score to rank up, you can input your name on the Ranking, in the style of Thunder Dragon, you can input more than three letters, allowing to put your real name or username.

FINAL HINT: You can try to use the slowdown of the split formation to navigate at a slower pace.



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More than just trophies, they're the key to rewards.

Like all present day consoles, one of their key aspects are the trophies and achievements. Sol Cresta not just have trophies to collect, they also grant you collectable points that once you've get a certain amount, you'll unlock new features for the game like the Sound Test, the Caravan and High Score modes and even new ships like the YMT-XX-FS Fusou, one of the Yamato prototypes, increasing the list of ships even further. However, most of the achivements are gonna be tough or even impossible since the "Without taking a hit" means DO NOT LOSE A SHIELD POINT just like in Dariusburst CS Chronicle Saviours, making this "Trophy Hunt" one of the most demanding ones of all time, if not THE MOST of all. Some of them are based on secrets, being the most cryptic the one that requires to keep shooting to a Formation Chip until a face appears, which gives you one of the trophies and a 10up.



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He entrusted the future of mankind to you, son.

After talking about all the aspects on Arcade Mode, it's time to talk about the Dramatic Mode. At first it looks like there's no too much to say about the Dramatic Mode on the base gameplay terms. This is one of the DLC's of the game and acts as the Story Mode. While being the same game as the Arcade Mode, it increases its length with a vast narrative and some Ace Combat-like pilot dialogues. One of the first differences with the regular Arcade Mode is that the ship selection feature is removed, forcing you to play with the Yamato. The added dialogue was very well executed as we have non-stop conversations like in Otomedius Excellent, Silpheed: The Lost Planet and even the Ace Combat games without being interrupted because someone talks, making the overall gameplay more solid and modern at the same time. Another difference with the game was the length of the stages, as they carry more fly-through-rings segments and even more boss fights. Along with the lore-enriched, extended stages, the Extra Stage retains the same rule as the Arcade Mode, as losing lives is a score penalty that will discount you 1,000 points per ship, but omits the looping on a higher difficulty.

xxx1993: Basically, it's much longer than the arcade mode, being more story driven and is about the length of watching a movie. It lasts two hours, not counting the end credits.

Speaking of the credits, they're no a bonus stage where do you have to shoot the most number of "Firework Drones" as possible to reveal part of the staff roll. You can use most of the formations, but the most required would be the Moon Formation in order to get most of the 83 of them.



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Classic space shooter gameplay, with terrible graphics.
(Click here for a full sized screenshot)


The graphics, to be honest, are HORRIBLE. I know the game tries to be nostalgic since it is announced as a "Neo-Classic", but the pixel art and the digitized backgrounds look between overcompressed in quality like a bad early 2000's AVI video file and overpixelated. I mean, you don't have to overpixelate things to look "Neo-Classic". Just take a look at Risk System, Gal Guardians: Demon Purge and CrossCode to know what I'm talking about: Pixel art that evokes the last days of the SNES, the finest moments of the Neo-Geo era and the nostalgic 2D games of the PlayStation. Sol Cresta fails on that aspect most of the time, except on the final stages where the background begins to carry more artificial structures which add more detailing and is quite impressive how well they worked on the animation of Trimurti Veda and Sol Mandler as if it was a Blazing Star-esque CG model. One thing that is worth to mention is the use of the classic in-game font used by Nichibutsu for the score indicators as well as the copyright on the logo screen, making it look like a classic videogame. The in-game interface on the sides of the screen is a nice touch. Rather than adding a wallpaper with character art or a massive interface like those from Raiden V and the M2 release of Battle Garrega, you have your Formation Gauges, Chips and the coin progression gauge indicating what are you gonna get next. In the Dramatic Mode DLC the game will add mugshots of the characters while they're talking.

xxx1993: It could be worse, but it's not that bad.
Well, I know its not top quality, but I'm sure PlatinumGames could do a little better.


What really looks incredible is the character artwork, which while being the all-time favorite anime style, it is very reminiscent of the 2000's Mazinkaiser anime, this is noticed on the expression of the characters, mostly noticed on Sho Tendo who has that Koji Kabuto influenced attitude. Religious and Mythical references are also abundant. Just like Neon Genesis Evangelion uses Catholic/Christian religious references and Ulysses 31 is based on Homer's Odyssey, Sol Cresta relies on both Japanese Mythology and Hinduism (see "Sol Trivia" below), combining the common elements of science-fiction with mystical references. Speaking of characters, this game brings back all the classic enemies from the previous Cresta games, helping new fans to connect with the series much easier, but leaving room for original designs at the same time to attract oldschoolers alike. The manual artwork makes a great job utilizing the fancy graphic style of the classic Nichibutsu arcade flyers giving an extra nostalgic touch to the game.

The music is a mix between Zanac's adventurous-fanfarrious soundtrack with Revenge of Shinobi's fast pounding action themed music. The Shinobi influence is no coincidence since we're talking Yuzo Koshiro, who is mostly known for both Streets of Rage/Bare Knuckle and the Super Shinobi series (Revenge of Shinobi and Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master) and he makes a splendind nostalgic work in this game with the "Neo-Chiptune" soundtrack he composed, adding both modernity and nostalgia at the same time and it sounds very Sega Genesis-like on pure old-school style. The voiced dialogues of the Dramatic Mode can best be compared with animes like Mazinkaiser and Getter Robo G due to the aggressive and fast-paced attitude of both protagonists and antagonists.


SOL TRIVIA

- The game borrows a good amount of references to Japanese religion and symbolism.
-- The base Amano-Iwato refers to a cave in Japanese mythology, where Susanoo drove Amaterasu, depriving the land of light. The cave also known as Ama-no-Iwato.
-- The plot involving Mandler depriving the Solar System from the Sun and its light nods the Amano-Iwato story.
-- Unit-01 "Amaterasu" refers to the Goddess of the Sun and the Universe and one of the major deities of the Shinto religion. She is the sister of Tsukuyomi and Susanoo.
-- Unit-02 "Tsukuyomi" is named after Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, the God of the Moon.
-- Unit-03 "Susano" comes from Susanoo-no-Mikoto
(Also known as Susanoo, Susano'o, or Susanowo), the God of the sea and storms.
-- The carrier "Yatagarasu" comes from the mythical crow which is also a guiding God.
-- The name "Yamato" has plenty of meanings in Japan, but it is highly possible that the ship was named after the Yamato-class battleship of the same name deployed on World War II.
-- The YMT-XX-FS "Fusou" is named after the ancient naming for Japan.
-- The YMT-XX-MS "Musashi" borrows its name from the Musashi Province, parts of today's Tokyo, Saitama and Kangawa prefectures. Musashi is also a common name in Japan.

- There is also references to Hinduism hidden in this game.
-- The enemy ship "Trimurti" is named after the trinity of supreme divinities in Hinduism. The name means "Three Forms" or "Trinity".
-- "Vishnu" is a reference to the God of Preservation. Its name can be translated as "All Pervasive", "The Pervader" or "One who is everything and inside everything".
-- The component "Brahma" is named after the God of Creation, also known as the God of the Universe. Unlike Vishnu and Shiva, the meaning of "Brahma" is uncertain because several related words are found in the Vedic literature, such as Brahman for the "Ultimate Reality" and Brahmana for 'Priest'.
-- The final component "Siva" is a reference to Shiva, the God of Destruction. Its name translates as "The Great God".
-- The Trimurti's humanoid form's Veda name comes from the religious texts originated in Ancient India. It is a Sansrkit word which means "Wisdom" or "Knowledge". Thus, Trimurti Veda means "Trinity's Wisdom".
-- Budah's name is obviously a nod to Buddha
(or Siddhartha Gautama), a religious teacher who founded Buddhism. As a word, Buddha means "Awakened One" or "Enlightened One".
-- Shukrah is named after Shukra, a Sanscrit word that means "Clear" or "Bright", it is used to refer the planet Venus, one of the Navagraha.
-- Rahhu's name sounds like Raghu, a ruler of the Suryavamsha dynasty in Hinduism. Raghu means "Quick".
-- Budah, Shukrah and Chandor have the Namaskara
(or "Anjali") hand gesture, known as "Gesture of Praying", also called the simple "Namaste" prayer position.
-- Sol Mandler's appearance is heavily based on both Shiva and Vishnu as a divinity with four arms, but it is surely more based on Shiva due to Sol Mandler's destructive nature.

- Luna's name comes from the Spanish and Latin word which means "Moon", fitting quite well with her role as the pilot of Tsukuyomi.
- Her real name Anum is a reference to the name of the personification of the sky/heaven, the King of Gods and ancestor of many deities on Mesopotamian religion. Anum is also known as An or Anu.
- Reichi and Reini's name comes from the kanji's that form the zero
(零 rei), one (一 ichi) and two (二 ni), which roughly translate their names as "Zero One" and "Zero Two".
- Dril's pet name Hamco comes from Hamster Co.
(HAMster COrporation), the current owners of Nichibutsu's intellectual properties.
- Dril's name is spelled the same way as "Drill".
- The owl shape of the Sol Cresta Gem and the owl logo on the coins are a reference to Nichibutsu/Nihon Bussan, the company that made the Cresta series.
- The Terra Cresta manuals for the DLC Wing Galibers wrongly calls them "WING GALIBUR"
- The 3D simulator depicted in the game lore is a cabinet with Terra Cresta 3D, which wasn't an arcade game, but a Sega Saturn game.
- Neptunus, Saturnus and Mercurius are the Dutch names of Neptune, Saturn and Mercury.
- Terra and Sol are Latin words for Earth and Sun.
- Sol also means "Sun" in Spanish.
- Reichi's quote "My senses are tingling" are clearly a nod to Spider-Man's catchphrase "My Spider-Sense is tingling".
- Like R-Type Final 2, Sol Cresta was another April Fools joke that became a reality.




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Just being the hero of the galaxy. Nothing short of poetry.

To be fair, Sol Cresta is the solid return of a classic franchise with some interesting ideas to execute with a nostalgic soundtrack based on the classic themes of the saga. If you're a pro-grade gamer or you're looking for a Gradius III-trainer for the escape sequence, then this is gonna be your sunbath and a baptism of fire at the same time.



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Some mastery is required and has a few flaws, but is still a good game.
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