DDP DOJ is basically perfect

[Some-Mist]

as someone who just picked it up again during the holiday to work on a chain run I was intrigued. scoring takes a lot of work and isn't much fun to learn since it's so rigid and unforgiving, and I've always been frustrated with it.

I don't play for score, so a few of the things you mention are lost on me, sorry. ) But I'll take your word for it on those points, I guess.

hmm

[ciox]

DOJ is about the last time you had really super detailed backgrounds with CAVE I think

??? I can think of a good number of CV1000 games with backgrounds having a LOT more detail (or at the very least looking a lot better) than DOJ. I don't remember the link, but someone had rips of a lot of CAVE game backgrounds and some of them are incredibly pretty and detailed. Whereas DOJs are easily ignored and drab and boring.

I'm not talking about artistic detail, just the level of detail of what's in there, DOJ is the only time you had complex animated machinery that blew up with hundreds of splintered fragments in the background, and not just occassionally on stage bosses, most of this stuff is in stages 4 and 5.
To compare, Ketsui has very cool and original minibosses, but they always dissappear in an explosion without leaving any massive destruction in the background, and the background doesn't have any big, detailed animated widgets either, it's not quite as epic as DOJ even if the game is more original in other ways.

There's still some exceptions to this with CV1000 games like Espgaluda 2 has some nice detail in places and stuff that doesn't just explode into nothingness or generic "burning patch of ground" sprites, like the part where the boss emerges from the big boat's innards, but DOJ still wins in my book when it comes to the detail in the 3d models used to render the background graphics and in having a background that reacts to your firepower.