Raiden V: Director's Cut for PS4 to be released by UFO Int.

[Shepardus]

Isn't there a "cheer attack" you can use when the bar fills up?

[Durandal]

Isn't there a "cheer attack" you can use when the bar fills up?

yes, you can activate it by pressing V

I think it's rather OP, I used it at the start of the ST3 boss and it turned the boss into an absolute walk in the park, as it cancels bullets and deals massive damage
it just lasts too long, the Cheer Attack energy doesn't get drained whenever a boss does a cinematic transformation sequence which I thought was a good thing originally, but then one lasted me for the whole boss fight and canceled everything in my way, which is just ridiculous

[d0s]

yes, you can activate it by pressing V

hahah but apparently IV is bad for having a charge shot

[Despatche]

So it has no effect on anything in game or your score? Seems kind of pointless.

Well, it's supposed to be. Being useful would be terrible for balance, and it would be a mistake for the player to disable it for any reason.

The blue bar at the bottom fills up on its own, but Cheering also fills it a bit. The blue bar is used for Cheer Attacks, which are kinda like the charge attacks in Raiden IV except not terrible. You don't want to use Cheer Attacks, because you get no multiplier for enemies destroyed with it. I doubt you can use it to weaken bosses for a speed kill afterward either, it probably sets up a flag on any enemy touched by it.

The weapon system is a bit unbalanced, some start underpowered or are difficult to use for long stretches - which the game often forces you to do, power ups are not that frequent. Your missile selection is locked in too, so that element of in-game strategy is removed. As a result it's pretty rigid - stick with the vulcan to get a clear, memorise weapon-switching points like hell if you want to level up all weapons and go for the TLB. Oh and the voiceover has a right go at you if you don't kill literally everything.

Found this earlier in the thread, might as well.

Quite the opposite. There's no real strategy to weapons in this series until you get to V. In most games, you almost always want vulcan+homing. A few specific times, you will want to switch to laser, such as certain bosses (some of this has to do with an exploit about boss health). Raiden III pretty much requires that you use the new radar missiles because of a weird bug that makes them stronger than nuclears (they're supposed to be between nuclears and homing). Raiden IV absolutely requires that you use homing missiles because of the charge shot. Way more rigid in every way.

Raiden V actually fixes some of this with its ships. You pick the ship you like and treat it as a separate thing. Unlike the previous games, you actually have to use all three main weapon types at some point. I still think that the three weapon sets should have been mapped to the three ships, but overall this is still significantly better than previous games.

despatche you got a really bad habit of using strawmen when people disagree with you, and this is coming from someone who hates the retarded intenet debate team guys who constantly accuse people of this but it so applies here. like nobody is complaining that the game is short and everyone knows how to properly get enjoyment out of a shmup on the shmups dot com forums. people are complaining that the game is too different compared to normal raiden, not the same

It's funny how you people keep talking about "disagreeing" instead of actually getting at the facts. I'm not "disagreeing" with anything, I'm telling you that you're factually incorrect. You can take your stupid strawmen and shove them up your ass, because you're the one who's missing the point.

I'm not going to explain the IGN comparison in exacting detail, because I know you'll "misunderstand" it anyway, and that is why the comparison works at all. You people truly do not know left from right in this genre, exactly like a good game journalist.

-The game is better than previous games because of things like my reply to TF's post above, and not having nonsense like the Raiden IV charge shot. Raiden III itself went a long way towards fixing problems with Raiden/II/DX.
-The game is not "overly long", it's exactly as long as a Raiden IV 360 ALL.
-The weird angle doesn't really hurt or help anything, it just makes a specific handful of people irritable for some reason. Eschatos, Ether Vapor and Astebreed, they were all the same way. Don't like 3D games? Oh well!

So on and so forth. These things are true, not my opinion or anyone else's. My opinion is that Raiden V still needs some work, but I'm not a game developer and so I can't do anything about that. For the price point and for people who aren't concerned with really minor details, Raiden V is a good buy. If you can't understand that much, then oh fucking well.

There's probably some part of this post missing, but I'm in a hurry.

[d0s]

Raiden III itself went a long way towards fixing problems with Raiden/II/DX.

These things are true,

I am part of the really small minority that actually likes III and thats straight up not true

e: also are you going to defend the lifebar and constant flow-destroying interruptions where the game stops everything to tally up your score for some reason

e2: missed this

-The weird angle doesn't really hurt or help anything, it just makes a specific handful of people irritable for some reason. Eschatos, Ether Vapor and Astebreed, they were all the same way. Don't like 3D games? Oh well!

III and IV are 3D and don't have the weird angle so idk what you're trying to say here, what does not liking the angle in this specific game have to do with not liking 3D games in general? the weird angle makes it feel not like a raiden game. maybe it works in those other games because they're not raiden games. screwing with that in a raiden game just feels like change for the sake of change and personally makes it harder for me to play the game, combined with the blurry backgrounds and weird bloom on everything it gave me insta-headache, it's not just a nitpicky complaint

[Shepardus]

Why are people complaining about the lifebar of all things? Isn't it the same thing as having lives except you don't blow up and lose all your powerups (which people seem to hate) when you take a hit?

[d0s]

Why are people complaining about the lifebar of all things? Isn't it the same thing as having lives except you don't blow up and lose all your powerups (which people seem to hate) when you take a hit?

research the illustrious history of lifebar in STG for your answer

[Shepardus]

Why are people complaining about the lifebar of all things? Isn't it the same thing as having lives except you don't blow up and lose all your powerups (which people seem to hate) when you take a hit?

research the illustrious history of lifebar in STG for your answer

I'm well aware, thanks for your insightful and high-effort response, I expected nothing less from the likes of you. I'm asking because there are plenty of shmups (Espgaluda, Deathsmiles, Guwange to some extent, etc.) where the "health bar" works exactly the same as a traditional life counter except you "respawn" in the same place you took a hit, and any criticism of it is little more than a kneejerk reaction against anything resembling a euroshmup, even if in name only. There are also shmups that have done well with more "lifebar-ish" systems, like Darius where shields are essentially life, and Astebreed. So tell me, as someone who has not played this game, what's so bad about this lifebar?

[Despatche]

Nice, you've revealed yourself to be an actual liar. Raiden III is a better game because bombs aren't garbage, because there's real scoring, because there's no infinite looping to trivialize any pursuit of score, because the previous two points combine to make no miss/no bomb actually mean something, because there's no bullshit with the medals anymore, and so on. The only area in which it really outright suffers is with some of the aesthetic, and unfortunately with the random Micluses (a series problem, which is one of the few things IV actually fixed (except that required the 360 Mode for the developers to really take advantage of it (because the original game was literally unfinished)) and is also present in V).

You know nothing about the history of lifebars in shmups. The lifebar in Raiden V works really well because not only is the game still designed around the no miss no bomb, it also allows the player to sensibly keep their bombs if they get hit, and it compelled the developers to give the Fairy a way less idiotic function. It works so well for every single possible group of players that you have to be willfully ignorant to take issue with it.

I'd even argue that the lifebar in Raiden V is better than, say, Astebreed. In the latter, casuals are compelled to rush through the game, give either a bad or good review depending on how much they spent, and never touch it again. In the former, you're still encouraged to learn the game and fight on, because the game doesn't do you any other favors except provide more lives, essentially. It's about like the CC or Touhou abundance of lives, but without their abundance of bombs (another good point).

I have no idea why or how you're complaining about a very small and very informative break in the action in a series that's all about being slow and plodding (until Raiden III happened, shock). New Raiden is so much better than old Raiden, fuck.

III and IV do, in fact, have such weird angles, as does Eschatos, and Ether Vapor and Astebreed. Please. There is nothing special about Raiden that has anything at all to do with angles. That is so nitpicky that I wonder if you even understand what Raiden is: a barebones Toaplan clone that just happened to be a small cut above most clones. It's a really fucking generic series and is a perfect poster child for what a shmup is.

The quote in Shepardus's sig is never more relevant than right now, for this game.

[iconoclast]

Anyone experience any game freezing on the PS4 version? I midway through stage 5 last night and the game just locked up. Music continued to play for about a minute, then it stopped. When i closed the game the console prompted me to fill out a "crash report" Hope this was just a one off sort of thing.

The Japanese version would crash whenever lots of people were online using the cheer function. They issued a patch a week or two ago that was supposed to fix it, but maybe it's still broken. (I haven't played recently so I dunno)

[The Coop]

Well. Here's a fun new update for anyone else wondering what's up with CDKeys and this game.

I've still gotten no word since yesterday from CDKeys about my lack of getting a Steam key for my preorder with them. But now, Raiden V: Director's Cut doesn't show up in a search on the site. And if you Google it with "CDKeys," it takes you to a page where the game's now listed as "out of stock."

Lovely

[Bananamatic]

Raiden V is a much better game. The stages are definitely not overly long, the game is actually the same length as a Raiden IV 360 Mode ALL. That's why they took out the loop.

I'm curious as to why you think this, I remember stages in Raiden IV having more to them than l/r incoming waves of tracking bullets with the occasional incoming waves of big ships, I have trouble nailing a gameplay theme for the first five stages of Raiden V I've played

pacing is important and it can make the game feel twice or half as long depending on how entertained you are
raiden IV has shorter stages and has 14 of them, more bosses that appear more often, not a 5 minute snoozefest right at the beginning that kills any fun the game might provide and turns you off from starting another credit
and you can always just play the arcade mode in raiden IV which is standard 2-all length

[jugu]

My 10 year old son and I played for 5 levels or so of the PS4 release. Crashed twice on startup for us. We eventually got it working after deleting and re-downloading. Lack of tate was disappointing to me, my son remarked on the voice acting and the lack of animated mouths for the characters. Bullets are hard to see. We had fun but it did feel unusually long.

[Despatche]

I have yet to run into any crashes on the PC version... that's worrying. Should be noted that there's still a bunch of Xbone references in the PC version at least.

Unfortunately, vertical mode isn't really possible without throwing the entire UI out, and the UI is half the point. Fortunately, the play area on a typical TV running this game in horizontal mode is bigger than the play area on the screen of a typical arcade cabinet. PCs users usually have smaller monitors than TVs, but it's still not too bad.

It's as long as it is because there's no loop, which is a good thing at the end of the day. When they're of the same or better quality, eight longer stages is always better than seven shorter stages repeated twice (or forever).

[d0s]

Get a PSX and Raiden Project and show him what we played in arcades or corner stores when we were 10

e:

and the UI is half the point.

depressing

[Despatche]

It's significantly less depressing when we live in an era where vertical mode isn't anywhere near as necessary.

[d0s]

I'd say it's more necessary now than ever due to screens getting even wider than they were when 4:3 monitors were tated

[Shepardus]

Screens have become larger and higher-res overall though (especially the latter). Crimzon Clover's UI works perfectly fine and its effects add a bit of extra flashiness to the game.

[d0s]

Screens have become larger and higher-res overall though (especially the latter). Crimzon Clover's UI works perfectly fine and its effects add a bit of extra flashiness to the game.

I love CC's effects (not sure what this has to do with vertical?) but I prefer running it in tate over having some UI junk on the sides of the screen and a small gameplay window in the center, this has only gotten worse as screens get wider, not better. Older games were played on candy cabs with 27-29" vertical 4:3 CRTs that you sat right up close to, now the option is a 50"+ TV that you view from a comparatively far distance or a much smaller PC monitor. I could see tate being pointless if you're sitting right up against a huge plasma TV or something (how many people do this?), but my PC monitor is 23" and 16:9, I pretty much have to rotate it for vertical games to not be postage stamps. Would gladly trade some UI stuff that does nothing for gameplay for a tate mode. How much more do you need on the screen besides score, ships, and bombs?

[Bananamatic]

an absolutely useless radar and subtitle window that you can't read while playing anyways?

[Despatche]

The panel with the Cheers is nice to have. Most of the various online charts are just really nice score-oriented splits that you can look at during breaks. The hints are actually pretty informative, particularly for new players. The third panel is fantastic when watching the run or at the continue prompt, every single screenshot needs to have that panel pulled up.

Regarding the play area, you can tunnel vision yourself if you really hate the UI that much. You still get a way bigger play area than usual, especially since most people have TVs at 55" or bigger. The zoomed-out sections are clearly made for big TVs, I'm having a bit of trouble on this 24" monitor, but not so much it's unplayable or anything. Seriously, a vertical version of this game isn't going to be that great, I'm not even sure the play area is 3:4 (kinda looks like it though).

Again, Touhou vertical isn't really all that great either. I don't understand why Touhou was never really slagged for this. I've seen like one person complain about Touhou panels, ever. Never seen anyone go after Toaplan panels either.

[d0s]

its a raiden game though, every previous raiden game has been designed for tate. being forced to play it in a tiny window of failure like toohoo feels weird

[Despatche]

Right, make that two people.

[ZellSF]

I don't like Raiden V, though I'm not a shmup expert so not going to argue about why I think the earlier games are better. I think PC gamers should stay away because of a sub-par port again. Raiden IV had a locked 1080p resolution forcing an unnecessary scaling step that hurt image quality, but Raiden V has a worse problem: it doesn't control its own game speed. Have a 120hz monitor? It will run at 2X speed unless you also run a framerate limiter.

[Despatche]

I just love how people think 1080p/60Hz is a subpar port. I also love how everyone seems to have a 144Hz monitor these days. Even worse than the 21:9 whinging, not gonna lie. At least 21:9 makes sense for Dariusburst, even if it's the only thing it actually makes sense for.

A really minor bug that's probably gonna be fixed anyway is a total non-issue in a world where the vast majority of people have 60Hz-specific monitors or already have 60Hz set up on their card.

[d0s]

I've returned the game so I can't make screenshots anymore but I looked up a play video on youtube to kinda illustrate one of my problems with this game. First off, here's raiden IV:

https://i.imgur.com/TzJYOLS.jpg

Notice the proportions and sizes, compare to raiden V:

https://i.imgur.com/g6Uu7Y3.png

I can't figure out why they did this, particularly for a game that's made to be played on a TV in your living room? Like I was playing with my face right up to a PC monitor and found it annoying even then

[Despatche]

Raiden V goes through a variety of zoom levels. Usually it's about the same level as other Raidens, sometimes it zooms out or even zooms in. Again, those sections are made for the bigger TVs that most people have.

Thanks for confirming that Raiden V is definitely not 3:4, by the way.

edit: ok fuck that was bait. got TWO confirms out of it though, thnx

[d0s]

from my own play and from watching this video it looks like its mostly zoomed out (compare with IV):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6rCsBF2Cew

[Despatche]

Also, the Cheer Attack is good for the Missions. Not happy about that. Hope Moss fixes it, huge downgrade.

[ZellSF]

I just love how people think 1080p/60Hz is a subpar port. I also love how everyone seems to have a 144Hz monitor these days. Even worse than the 21:9 whinging, not gonna lie. At least 21:9 makes sense for Dariusburst, even if it's the only thing it actually makes sense for.

A really minor bug that's probably gonna be fixed anyway is a total non-issue in a world where the vast majority of people have 60Hz-specific monitors or already have 60Hz set up on their card.

The game does not function properly without workarounds. Because they skipped very basic QA. It might be a non-issue to you, but there are plenty of similar edge cases like this and sooner or later you'll run into one. Will you still then claim it's a non-issue when you have to do the game publisher's work for them? Work that almost every other publisher does properly?

I never said 1080p/60hz was subpar but I feel that was directed at me. I only said Raiden IV's 1080p port was subpar because I managed to fix it myself. It's OK if you make a game that's 1080p only. It's not OK when you make a game that's just arbitrarily locked to 1080p and could be fixed by a developer in less than an hour. That is subpar. I don't know what games you've played, but I'm pretty sure for every game you mention with similar issues I can come up with 10 without any such issues.