BulletMagnet wrote:
Never say never, but at this point I still haven't been convinced regarding the "gem" part of the equation...the medaling in particular, like Trizeal's, seems very haphazard to me, and some sections come across as very quarter-munchy. Feel free to set me straight if I'm missing something though, as I don't know the game inside and out. As far as Rapid Hero is concerned, it and its HMs make up what I might call the "lovably generic" part of the list, i.e. the "just another jet plane shooter" that you still somehow enjoy (Air Gallet certainly isn't one of mine, but it's got enough fans for a mention). There's still time for changes, so feel free to say whatever you feel needs saying.
Well I'll put down my two cents then since I get the impression that your (and this forum's) view of the game is somewhat based on misconceptions, especially your worry about the medalling.
1. Medal method
In regards to the medalling, it looks tedious at first but not nearly as much as you think. There are no extends so it's not like it's absolute necessity to collect medals, and unlike Battle Garegga and co it doesn't take many to get it back up to max value (10 > 20 > 30 > 40 > 50 > 100 > 500 > 1000, so 8 which can appear in a span of like 1 second in this game). You can actually get more points just forgetting about picking up medals in some segments and killing everything on the screen than wasting your time trying to bump up the chain again, so it's pretty lax while still leaving lots of room for optimisation.
Some parts will probably make you rage if you're not careful (the V-pattern tanks from left/right/top/bottom in Stage 3-A come to mind) but that's where stockpiling and using of the void charge shot come in real handy, or better yet actually noticing they've been on the screen for about 5 seconds and actually killing them. I'm not terribly familiar with how Trizeal works but from what I've seen/heard this is pretty much the prototype concept for it but there are a few noticeable differences. It basically boils down to knowing the right place to be at the right time - not unlike a lot of shooters hailed to be so good here.
2. Objective-based stage progression
Raiden Fighters have some things like this such as bonus enemies appearing if you quick-shot a series of bombers, but this takes it to entire segments of the stage. Some of the requirements are pretty straightforward (kill the three blue tanks in Stage 2 quick enough and the stage scrolls to two train tracks, otherwise it goes straight to the boss) while others (like progression into 3-A/3-B) there isn't much to guide you on that - no one complains about this with Cave's TLB requirements.
I think this is probably one of the less-noticed but more awesome parts of the game. I've seen games do similar stuff by transferring to alternate stages but none that actually change the in-stage positions and content - of if there are there can't be that many.
3. weapon design
By themselves the wide shot, homing missiles and laser are pretty plain but I quite like the mixed weapon system which Trizeal changed to make separate. I'm not the foremost expert but I thought having all three of the weapons at various power levels quite interesting and something I haven't seen in other shmups.
4. Lack of information
It took me getting trap15 interested in the game for us even to get something of a half-decent ST thread for it, with sound banking fixes in MAME a nice bonus. Before that there was an RQ which had next-to-nothing on it and a few people saying the PCB likes to overheat and the game is 'lacklustre' - so channeling the forum search function and Googlefu didn't actually benefit that much results as to how the game works. Oh, and Thunder Force (the forum member, not the game)'s post citing something about a possible relation to the Seibu Kaihatsu devs, one Nico video and a few YouTube vids played by people who had as much of a clue as I did. If that's not hidden mechanics I don't know what is.
Fun Fact:
The jury's still out on this one but I actually suspect there's a second upgraded board for G-Stream around the place that may or may not fix some of the more niggling issues about it, although it could be possible that the most obvious sign of this that I've seen (the actual ship appears in the title screen) may be a time-delay unlock of some sort on the same board, so who knows. The lack of an actual staff role when there was obviously meant to be one seems odd too.
So yeah, I actually quite like this game. It's obscure, probably a bit more sane than what I've seen come out of some of Triangle Service's titles, and a damn shame the few people who realise this exists don't like it because of some non-existant proximity scoring mechanic they can't actually explain, or it doesn't look enough like Cave.
