Illyrian wrote:I hope everyone enjoys having lazily designed bullet patterns killing them because they are moving at the speed of light.
False, the boss bullet patterns are great (aside from a few stinkers like the point blank spread from the boat mech).
Seriously, they're not dense, and for
most of the first loop not
too fast, but they still have a sense of "confusion" and "panic" to them thanks to criss crossing patterns, which most devs have a hard time achieving while using x2 as many bullets. I have to seriously respect that, especially as a beginning shmup dev trying (and failing) to come up with decent bullet patterns.
That being said, I'm honestly not a fan of the level design in this. Enemies, their placement, etc. all feel kind of bland. Much like Batsuugan, the levels feel functional, but there's not a lot of smart stuff going on IMO. Maybe that'll improve when I hit the loop.
A lot of the ships and charge shots also feel a bit weird to me, some of the charge shots feel redundant (ie "why would you attack the boss with anything but a charge attack" for some of them), or not terribly useful. That might be my lack of knowledge of the game speaking, but if that's true they could still be a bit more intuitive. The Zero and the bullet cancelling ship are great though.
Overall, I'm seriously enjoying this, though I think it's obvious how far Psyiko came with Dragon Blaze.
Captain wrote:I like how everyone has different favorite planes.
Gripes about this game's ships aside, that is one thing I like about Psyikyo, and which became more and more obvious with each game they made: Every character has a completely different playstyle. The dudes and dudette in Dragon Blaze all feel like different character classes in an rpg with their differing balances of melee/range/magic/speed/screen coverage/bomb defense/etc.
On that note, Dragon Blaze is also the only Psyiko shmup I've played where I genuinely like the level design. So many ways to tackle everything thanks to the mechanics.
No doubt I'll do horrible with the stick, though... 
