What About Brave Blade?

freddiebamboo · Post by **freddiebamboo** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 1:13 am

This game has been an enigma to me for a while now, as far as I know it was the last true raizing game (ibara not counting), and it's in kinda 3d according to the sheep's site.

The hi-score board doesn't get much action and last time I checked, the mame version was god awful.

Can anyone shed light on what it's like, or even if it's on a par with their other shooters?

Damocles · Post by **Damocles** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 1:36 am

To me it _feels_ a bit different from other Raizing games. It has a few neat aspects such as a variation on chaining medals as well as a nice variety of characters. It still runs a little bit slow in Mame, but is playable at least to get a feel for it.

ill6 · Post by **ill6** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 9:01 am

I have only plugged it in once but it seemed rubbish... Del tells me its pretty good though and he knows a thing or two.

sven666 · Post by **sven666** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 9:44 am

it IS a great game, kinda crappy graphics tho which is what i think puts most people off... but gameplay is topnotch.

very hectic, this is raizings "ketsui" in a way as youre encouraged to go as close as possible to your enemies and use short range attacks.

medalling is pretty straight forward but does anyone know if there are any "hidden" scoring features like a combo/chain system or anything like that?

Ord · Post by **Ord** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 3:16 pm

I really like it (Iwasn't too sure at first, but it's really grown on me) I love the fact that you can up the value of the medals by physically striking them with your mele attack.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Oct 27, 2005 6:46 pm

i love it to bits. sadly though right now i have to play it mame.

and i wouldn't say its god awful, it just needs improvement. it runs slow on my comp at home (it bites), but all the graphics are there, as far as i've seen, and the actual play still seems intact.

edit: actual just had a quick go on it, it runs really well on my schools computers (precisely the speed i'd expect, actually). i'm running mame32 ver .100.

Randorama · Post by **Randorama** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 12:17 pm

Note: the team developing it, to my knowledge, didn't include any of the former Raizing programmers (of both teams Garegga and team Sokyugurentai). As always, a great source is the mame history file or arcade-history.com .

Post by **Icarus** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 1:42 pm

Randorama wrote:Note: the team developing it, to my knowledge, didn't include any of the former Raizing programmers (of both teams Garegga and team Sokyugurentai). As always, a great source is the mame history file or arcade-history.com .

Just out of curiousity Rando, I'm guessing parts of "Team Garegga" went on to program Batrider and Bakraid, given similar gameplay styles (and maybe had a hand in Great Mahou and Brave Blade as well). What did "Team Soukyu" go on to program? Or did they mix up programmers from both teams for each project?

I'm quite interested in tracing the programmers as they worked at Raizing, from Mahou Daisakusen to Brave Blade, to see who was involved with what project. R8ZING is pretty informative when it comes to the games themselves, but doesn't have much information on the actual programmers and artists.

sven666 wrote:medalling is pretty straight forward but does anyone know if there are any "hidden" scoring features like a combo/chain system or anything like that?

Medals go up to 100k in Brave Blade, you can quickly increase the values by whacking them in Armor Form (smack a cluster of Medals to really accelerate the value increase), and you get more Medals for destroying enemies in Armor Form than you do in Fighter Form (one Medal for every 2-3 enemies in Armor, one Medal every 5 in Fighter).

I think rank is tied to Armor/Fighter usage as well. Given that all Raizing rank systems aim to make you play the game using a particular weapon system (which itself is tied to a scoring system, think Web in Souky for example) then being in Armor Form is more beneficial in the long run. Just more risky. (... but then you have the Awakening Attack as backup ^_-)

By the way, if you want to score well, plan careful usage of the Armor Shield (hold the B button) and the Awakening Attack (press C) in particular places.

Randorama · Post by **Randorama** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 3:01 pm

Well, extrapolating from the hazy memories i have (too lazy to check now on the mame history file...), Team soukyugurentai did the first two mahous, Sokyu and Dimahoo, but also the Bloody Roar series. Some of them, i think, have gone to Milestone. I know that Chaos Field's makers are all ex-Compile people, and in the Edge interview they said that some of them came from another company...

Shinobu Yagawa (Incognoscente,if you're reading: any clues on this?) must have been one of the first generation of Toaplan shmups programmers. Surely he was at Toaplan, but i can't say if he was from the beginnings or not (Joker Jun talks about the two generations in his interview, i think IKD does as well). I speculate that his status of "legend" of shmup programming is based on this. Now, Bakraid, if i remember well, has Tatsuya Uemura in its credits. Uemura is the musician behind Zero Wing and Pipi and Bibis, in my knowledge. He should work at Capcom now, i think he moved while doing Dimahoo.

What's funny is that Raizing, at some point, represented the sum of the '80s styles, at some point: console (Compile) and arcade (Toaplan).

gameoverDude · Post by **gameoverDude** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 9:01 pm

Zinc does Brave Blade quite a bit faster than MAME. ZincFE is a decent front end GUI for it.

BB is still rather good even if the PS1 3D hardware graphics are a little hurtin' in some places. Knocking medals back with the sword to mark them up is great as long as you don't get too many of them on screen at once.