Brand new, mysterious shmup from Compile Heart

[xxx1993]

https://www.gematsu.com/2023/10/compile ... l-and-more

Recently been announced, and is also a collaboration with M2. It will be coming to unannounced consoles in late summer 2024 in Japan. Designs of the ship and main character have also been released. Wonder what it could be?

[Steven]

Hopefully M2 is the one taking the lead on this. If not, I would not be surprised to see 25~30FPS on PS5 because Compile Heart has no idea how the fuck to make games properly at all and then a three-year-late botched PC port that is based on the shitty Switch version and crashes every 15 minutes. Yes, this is, from what I have heard, the current status of Compile Heart. They make 30FPS games on the fucking PS5 of all things and release PC versions of the Switch games instead of the PS4 versions.

Hopefully this new leadership of theirs or whatever will fix the company somehow.

[xxx1993]

I just hope it turns out to be good. I have ups and downs with Compile Heart myself.

[Steven]

Compile Heart is like a D+ to C- tier developer at best, but they sometimes manage to escape their own incompetence in rare instances and make something that is actually good. Let's hope this is one of those rare instances, or, preferably, that M2 is handling all of the stuff that's actually important.

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[Steven]

I somehow missed the Famitsu article entirely, so that's good. M2's original shooters that I have played, Senjin Aleste and GG Aleste 3, are both pretty great, so I will look forward to it. It's probably less "Brand new, mysterious shmup from Compile Heart" and more "Brand new, mysterious shmup from M2".

[xxx1993]

I just hope it’s a completely original title, and not a spin-off from Neptunia!

[Lander]

Nice OC.

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[Lander]

Yeah, Original Character.

And sure, it's nicely designed. It also constitutes 90% of this announcement, if we go by effort spent

[Steven]

She looks like one of those characters that shows up in a single Neptune game and is then never seen or mentioned ever again despite being a main character in her single appearance. She's cute, though, I suppose.

I never really thought about it until now, but I wonder how difficult it must be to design ships for these games, specifically avoiding the "generic starfighter", "generic helicopter", and "generic airplane" stuff and creating something that is unique enough to be identifiable without looking ridiculous. Of course, then Sonic Wings and Strikers come along and they're literally just F-15s and Fw 190s and stuff.

In this case, we seem to have "generic starfighter", but I'm not really picky, so this is fine.

[cfx]

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[Steven]

lol yeah, I was thinking the same thing!

I look at pilot girl, assuming she is the pilot, and then I look at the ship, and then I think that most people might not think they are art assets from the same game. If it was me, I'd at least try to make Pilot-chan (assuming she is the pilot) and the ship at least somewhat look like they are supposed to be from the same game, but if that's how they want to do it...

One good thing about Compile Heart being involved is that this is basically guaranteed to get released overseas. If it was M2 alone, it would probably be Japan-only. That wouldn't too much of a problem since console games are all region-free now, but I guess it would probably have non-Japanese language options that probably wouldn't be there otherwise.

[cfx]

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[Tatsuya79]

Actually the girl is a giant ship and the ship is an alien pilot inside her head.

[Steven]

One good thing about Compile Heart being involved is that this is basically guaranteed to get released overseas. If it was M2 alone, it would probably be Japan-only. That wouldn't too much of a problem since console games are all region-free now, but I guess it would probably have non-Japanese language options that probably wouldn't be there otherwise.

Good point. While I imagine most shmup fans are used to dealing with Japanese menus and such, I'm sure this game is going to have some kind of probably fairly significant story mode that wouldn't be translated if it wasn't going to be released outside of Japan.

Since they are making a point about it being a serious game, I also expect it to have some type of arcade mode without that part as well.

I hadn't thought about all that, and it brings up a relevant point for me. I'm a weirdo, and prefer to buy the Japanese versions of most games if they have English options, and with how many games get simultaneous releases in Japan and the West now, at least on PS4 many Japanese releases are like this, though certain publishers commonly do it, and some seldom if ever do. Compile Heart hasn't done it, though they're also still releasing their games much later in the west compared to Japan still. Neptunaia Game Maker R:Evolution still doesn't even have a date for US or Europe beyond "2024."

There are many Switch games that do this; there's a single build of the game that is made and the only difference between regions is the sticker on the cart and the box art. Every cart has every language and the DLC from regions that are different from the game work because there's actually only one version of the game. Most games published by Nintendo are like this, but so are some Sega games, and I think about half of my Smash DLC is from the USA eshop and the other half is from the Japanese eshop.

I can't think of many PS4 games that do this, but I do know that PS4 Valkyria Chronicles can share save data between the NA and Japanese versions but seems to have separate trophy sets, which is really weird.

I wouldn't count on Compile Heart to not fuck up the translation, though; I've heard their recent English translations have been quite terrible in addition to taking forever.

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[Lander]

Single-build is the smart move from a software engineering standpoint - less work and easier to test if the groundwork is laid early. Fiddling with MAME, I'm impressed to see the practice reaching back into the arcade era with certain titles that cram everything into one ROM and leave region-specifity to DIP settings and preburned NVRAM.

What's the over-under on Compile Heart having M2 do a PC release?

I never really thought about it until now, but I wonder how difficult it must be to design ships for these games, specifically avoiding the "generic starfighter", "generic helicopter", and "generic airplane" stuff and creating something that is unique enough to be identifiable without looking ridiculous. Of course, then Sonic Wings and Strikers come along and they're literally just F-15s and Fw 190s and stuff.

It's a tricky one, seeing as all of the fundamental ideas - pointy ship, rounded ship, double pronged, etc - were snapped up by the genre-definers long ago. I think it's still quite possible to create a rad design, but harder than ever to avoid feeling derivative of some classic work. Especially now we're into the era of unified PBR renderers that make everything look samey without informed tweaking.

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[Steven]

Usually what they do is to put out the Japanese console versions and then a year or two later they'll release a dual-language Japanese/English PC version alongside the overseas console versions. Their PC ports are usually somewhere between low-to-no-effort-but-acceptable and barely playable.

Usually none of their games are optimized at all on consoles or PC, leading to horrendous framerates across the board for no good reason, but with M2 around it should be okay this time. Most of the time their games do not have framerate caps, so although they'll struggle to run on consoles, you can typically brute-force through the lack of optimization with sufficiently powerful hardware to get good framerates, like playing their PS4 games on PS5, which has enough overhead to do this, or by having a nice PC. Again, M2 is here, so I don't think this will be a problem.

[spmbx]

I had to google Compile and Compile Heart because i don't think i've really seen or played any of their games in 20-25 years or so. Apparently they mainly make some crappy rpg-like stuff now? I'm assuming the crappy ports you're talking about is about those games.

Anyway, the supposed shmup Touhou Spell Carnival also seems to be some rpg with some shmup elements or whatever

Interviewer: Interesting. So, although Touhou Project has a strong image as a shmup, this is a tactics RPG?

Yasui: Yes, it’s part of the tactics genre, but it features a good combination of the barrage element of shooting and tactical battles, and it also incorporates elements common in shmups, such as high-powered bombs. The battles progress in real-time, so I think you’ll be able to feel the Touhou atmosphere, even with the different genre.

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[Lander]

M2's G-Darius was really solid on PC, so it'll probably be good if it does come.

And interesting write-up - I didn't realize Compile Heart had roots reaching back to Compile of shmup fame!

It also means that, however remote, there's a chance that the Randar no Bouken series may someday see a long-awaited fourth entry
Or at least cameo as an anime girl in some impenetrable metatext about anthropomized game industry concepts. They still make those, right?

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[Steven]

Compile Heart games usually have some pretty excellent music, so at least there is that, even if at least some of it is outsourced. You can expect a nice soundtrack, but given the genre of this game, it would be a massive problem if it was something less than outstanding anyway.

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[Steven]

That first game is just really really strange. Someone on the dev team said "let's make it so the player is not allowed to use healing items outside of battle at all! Let's also make it so that using healing items in battle is random!" and then the rest of the dev team said "yeah, that sounds great! Let's do that."

They also said "let's make it so that the entrances to dungeons that the player is required to go to only appear for a limited amount of time! If the player misses the dungeon entrance, they'll have to intentionally waste time until the dungeon appears again!"

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

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[Steven]

I haven't played Trinity Universe, but I have played the original HDN, although it's been over a decade and I dropped it fairly quickly. Good thing I bought it used and didn't pay too much for it. From what I remember and as far as I know, it's still the only game in the entire series that actually has an animated opening instead of just the character portraits. That's about where the game's good aspects end, though... before you even start playing the game!

I haven't played any of the games in the series after MDN VII (which is, quite surprisingly, actually a pretty decent game!), though discussions with people that have generally give me the idea that I have missed very little that is actually worth playing.

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