Okay, so, how is it? Well, my initial impressions were rather mixed, actually, but after a few plays, I really started to like it. The steampunk setting is a plus, the lovely 2D levels and enemies another plus, and the responsive controls another big plus. The minuses appeared quickly too, however.
The enemies use -lots- of long and thin bullets (you thought the giant bullets in Garegga were bad? Hah!), which got on my nerves (I never liked those things much), and the shrapnel... oh god, there is SO MUCH shrapnel in this game. It can be really, really hard to see what's going on in some of the levels simply because of the amount of crap flying around... yes, it really lets you "feel" the destruction you're causing, but I died way too many times from bullets that were partially obscured. Thankfully, the shrapnel problem is only present on the levels, and not on the bosses.
The powerup system is good, but it has a couple drawbacks: you get powerups for your main gun and then different types of "options" for the three gunpods that follow you around. When you stop firing, your movement aims the gunpods, which remain fixed when you're shooting. This is all fine. The variety of gunpods is nice, but the fact that there is at least one pod which is significantly weaker than the others - the machine gun - is a little annoying, since if you pick up an option it will replace one of the three you have; in effect, once you're past level 1 the machine gun is a power-down. Hrm. Also, why can't you pick which ship you want to be? Player 1 is the faster, weaker ship and player 2 is stronger and slower. I really don't understand why they fixed the ships to the players...
And yes, the biggest minus about the game is back from all of Raizing's other games... rank. Oh god is the rank system in Ibara vicious. Even the level 1 boss changes drastically depending on what your rank is - and it only goes downhill from there. This isn't bad if you're used to it, or if you don't mind rank systems (of course), but it drives me nuts. I managed to mash my way up to partway through level 4 before I simply found myself unable to cope with the amount of crap onscreen... there is -NO- way to 1CC this without mastering the rank system, and you can quote me on that.
The level design is solid, if a little "ordinary" - you go through a factory level, an ocean level, a train level (gee, a train level in a shmup, who'da thunk it?), etc. They're all well designed and fun, but they're not exactly original. The bosses fare a bit better, as they're nice, funky steampunk planes (well, mostly planes) that have a nice variety of pretty weaponry to reduce you to cinders with. There's an oddly large amount of ground enemies - tanks and fixed structures (buildings and turrets) - I think you destroy way more of those things than enemy planes. It's not a bad thing, it's just a little odd.
Other random comments... ahh yes, the bombs. I like them, they're a mix between the "strategic" bombs a la Raizing and the "oh shit" bombs of Cave. They come out quickly and destroy bullets, which is good, but they don't last very long, nor do they cover much territory if you only have a partial bomb (this game uses the Raizing system of gathering lots of bomb icons to build up a single regular bomb icon, and you can use partial bombs). The wave motion cannon bomb that they made a big deal about at first is REALLY powerful, although it's hard to save up enough bomb icons to use it later. It stays onscreen for a while (it creates this cool red vortex and slit across the screen) and keeps damaging whatever is under it (a boss, hopefully) and destroying bullets that touch it. I don't know how much it affects your rank, but I'm guessing it drives it up quite a bit. Why? Everything else does.
Ahh yes, one more little quip: the flamethrowers are really hard to see. They're not very bright and are partially transparent, so it's easy to overlook them in the middle of an intense firefight. One of the other people I watched play the game obliviously flew into a flamethrower shot too, so it wasn't just me.
Rundown:
Good stuff:
Steampunk theme
Flexible powerup system
Level & boss design
Control
Bomb system is balanced
Character designs (all the bosses are scantily clad cute female pilots
)Bad stuff:
Evil, evil rank system
"Power down" machine gun options
Too much shrapnel
Slowdown is unpredictable (lots of slowdown in the train level, but not much against many of the bosses... where it might be helpful
)Enemy bullets can be hard to see (small bullets obscured by shrapnel and items, flamethrowers are too pale)
Did I mention the rank system?
It seems that years later, the Raizing crew (now under the auspices of Cave) still make the same type of games. Virutally all the good points and bad points of their old classics are revived here, making it a newer and prettier game that's easy to get used to (or easy to get fed up with for some, I'm sure). I might have talked a lot about negative things here, but that's because they're easier to discuss than the good points. (A whole thread about how the levels are good or how the bosses are fun would be pretty dull to read - and to write.) Ibara might be hard (really hard), and the rank in it might be really strict and hard to deal with, it's a damn fun game, and I'm glad it was made. I'll definitely feed some more money into next time I get the chance, and I'll start praying for a home version too.
