MachineAres 1CC wrote: Would like to hear other people's thoughts on the game now that it's pretty readily available to play. What do you guys think?
Yeah, my take differed from yours in some places.
-The music isn't too great. While it has it's moments, most of the tracks also have a section that's ultra repetitive and grating, and often escalating in pitch and they can be distracting when trying to dodge patterns and stuff, so this could've been a lot better.
Interesting. Couldn't really hear it well where I was playing, so interested to give it another listen. Maybe home ports will get another soundtrack like some other M2 games? I only really noticed the music in the 2nd to last stage, it seemed pretty catchy to me.
-Visuals, patterns, and enemy layouts are pretty fun and a lot closer to something like the DoDonPachi series, but still has a little bit of the Aleste feel, especially with the power-ups.
Agree that the patterns are pretty Cave-ish. I did like the directional scrolling bits; seems like maybe M2 wants to make that a characteristic of the series (heavily used in GGA3 as well).
-The "blow" system is a nice last-resort move that just temporarily changes the trajectory of bullets around the character so they re-approach you in a different way, but doesn't cancel them, so there's a nice balance and it's not over-powered.
Yeah, this was probably my favorite of the 'new' systems. IME, 'Blow' knocks the nearby bullets out in a circular pattern, and immediately re-orients all their trajectories to face exactly where your ship is. I like how you can't use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, you have to have a plan to get away even after using it. Very nice how this synergizes with the bullet-hell shot patterns and the dominate play pattern of tap-dodging - blow forces you to take a different approach since all those bullets are now headed straight for you.
-The power-up system is a little confusing, as the tutorial doesn't explain it terribly well.
Yeah, I agree. Especially with the p-chips charging it, and different metal sizes/values, and the marquee text saying there's some kind of trade-off between trigger the power-up bar drain and damage output. I'm not clear on how it all works. But I guess a lot of Cave games have similarly 'deep' systems that take a while to come to grips with. I'm sure it will be pretty good once familiar with it given the developer pedigree, at least.
-There's the "leader" system where you choose a designated "leader" for your team, and there's an overall perk that affects all 4 team members that's different for each character if you pick them as the leader. It's a pretty cool idea but feels like a little more could've been done with it.
I think there are a couple of 'systems' where the presentation they chose doesn't do a good job of selling the mechanic, and this is one of them. From a design perspective, it seems like they wanted some kind of up-front selectable mechanic and for the 'in-fiction' dressing, they made it choosing a leader character. Weird choice IMO since they are going with completely separate ships as the in-stage weapon switching, so picking one pilot as leader having some blanket effect, even when you're using different ships... feels like a stretch? Good mechanic, confusing in-fiction dressing. I think inexperienced players might think the leader effects only work when you're using that ship, or that they change when changing ships. I think they could have use a different 'in-game' dressing that would have been less confusing, or just not tied it to the game setting at all, just have it be another of the options you choose at the beginning like 'dramatic mode' and 'auto/manual', now they add a 'bonus effect' selection that has no in-fiction explanation.
-The system of having 4 characters that are actively switched between is not great either. The nice part about it is it can make it feel a bit more like many old Compile games where you can build up a lot of lives to get through the game, but it's also very annoying that when the pickups to change characters appears, you almost have to pick them up, as they're huge and stay on the screen a looong time and will get in your way of dodging if you don't pick it up. Almost forcing you to change characters whenever the devs felt like throwing the item at you is a weird choice.
I think this is another of those systems where the way they dressed it up isn't that elegant. It retains some of Aleste's 'rotating alphabet' powerup style, but feels like they wanted to 'beef up' powerups from a simple weapon change into entirely different loadouts with different styles of subweapons, and different speedup levels bundled in all together. In that way, I actually think that having them be different ships makes sense. It's just hard to wrap my brain around all the ramifications though, since it's a combination of what in most other games are two or more completely separate systems (powerups, sub powerups & speedups, invuln on pickup as a strategic element, lives/extends). This is where it feels like maybe the 'in-fiction' dressing of 4 ships instead of the usual 'one ship with lives and weapons' setup feels less elegant to me. Weirdly I felt like it all worked fine in practice once I got a feel for it, and it seemed to have some depth. Just a confusing way to present it, I think.
Having spent a lot of time with the Aleste collection recently, I feel that the 'almost forcing you to change' mechanic is in previous iteration's pickup items too - both in how the pickup items can be hard to dodge, and how they sometimes expect you to grab them just for the half second of invulnerability, and plan the enemy/bullet density to coincide with when the items are put on screen. So, I think an argument could be made that if they want to make it a large part of the game's identity, it's in the series DNA.
-The way that bomb items are often strategically placed during sections where the patterns get pretty complex is a nice mechanic that gives a satisfying feeling when you pick one up. The fact that you can't save bombs for later and that they explode upon pickup is also a pretty cool mechanic that makes you have to force your way over to it, often through dense patterns.
I need more time with this - it just seemed like they re-purposed bombs from the usual 'oh sh!t' button into a scoring mechanic, but I was playing on novice so maybe bombs have more utility for saving your ass on higher difficulties. In novice, they seemed to pretty much just exist for turning everything into metals once you have hit the powerup button - I hardly ever found myself without another way to get out of tough patterns, since the game has 3 other mechanics that all can serve this function (blow, powerup's temp shield, and ship change's temp shield).
-It's kinda weird that the game has the ShotTriggers branding, which has always previously been for console releases only. Also, with a slight editing of a config file in the arcade version, a whole main menu appears that looks pretty close to what the console menu for most shmups looks like, with several different modes and options, so it makes it feel like a console or real home PC release might not be too far off if it's already kinda been coded for it in some ways.
Yeah, there has to be a home release at some point! Hopefully this game is a good, low-risk way for M2 to see what kind of market they can command at arcades in Japan and I'm sure there are a number of other benefits/considerations, but there's no way IMO that it's not leading up to a big M2STG home release.
Overall the game is pretty fun, but would be a hard sell for $60 if they try to release it that way on its own. There's just not that much content here, even though the different endings are pretty nice. Would be much better to include this on a new Aleste collection that has the MegaDrive/PCE/older OS games from the series that weren't in the first collection instead, kinda like they did with GG Aleste 3.
I'm guessing they'll release it on it's own but at a lower price point of like 4800y or the like? We'll see, I guess.
Overall had a really fun time with it, and it seemed to have some depth. Looking forward to getting more time with it.