Anyone else feeling the Daifukkatsu meh?

[Skykid]

Probably a contentious topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else is underwhelmed by Daifukkatsu?

The graphics are gorgeous and colourful, like a shmup firework display, but somehow the game is completely without character. Donpachi had bags of character, Dodonpachi too with its lovely pixel graphics, DOJ with its soundtrack and elemental dolls - yet DFK feels like a colourful but empty candy wrapper to me.

I suppose this is to do with the gaming experience. Personally, I'm struggling to find a comfortable spot with the game. I hate autobomb so Power is the only style to try to make headway in - but then I also dislike having no bombs (and having ones you collect autobomb.) It's a crappy way to balance things.
While I like the hidden bosses, I really dislike chaining in this game. If you foul up holding a full chain on the early stages, that's you pretty much screwed off the scoreboards. It might be easier to hold the chain than DOJ, but in DOJ you can drop it a few times in a stage and still score well by having some decent combo building and hyper activating. In DFK, you're at the mercy (in scoring terms) of having to hold those chains steady throughout. Drop it and your score suffers so bad you may as well start over. It's painful how many times I restart the first stage, to the point where I just don't give a shit about it anymore.

If I want to 1CC the game I'll use Strong type and blaze it, who cares. But I don't like Cave's modern idea that the game can be relatively easy, you should just learn to mine and squeeze points out of each stage like a loaded sponge. I prefer my shmups to intertwine score and progression, and DFK doesn't strike that balance.

I'm hoping Ketsupachi is a radical enough change to make me forget about the tediousness of vanilla DFK (and that BL improves in more than just the soundtrack.)

So is it just me or has anyone else shelved their DFK already?

[Strider77]

no

end of line

[Thjodbjorn]

I'm really enjoying arrange a a lot. B is fun, too. I've been spending more time with them than 1.5.

[DragonInstall]

Yes I shelved my DFK already due to 1 drop chain being so painful. Best looking shmup by far, love the hidden boss, different routes, and just the overall bullet patterns of bosses. Really dislike having to collect every bee for an Ura loop. The first hidden Ura boss is pretty annoying to get... so right off the bat I'm not too into starting.

But mainly its the chaining system being so important to score. I love Esp II BL because its scoring has so much flexibility. You fuck up somewhere, ouch it hurts but there are tons of other places in the stage you can try to make up for that hiccup. The chain system in Esp II is also much more forgiving as its a bar, and once its full, it goes down slowly. Pretty easy to maintain, and very easy to pick it up if dropped. Also its just the bar not the combo hit that helps the score in that regard. So dropping the bar isn't that bad if you can pick it up to max fast again.

Too be fair, I'm going to give it another go again before DFK BL comes out. Hopefully it sparks something.

[antares]

Play Arrange A. It's the main game mode on the disc for me.
Playing 1.5 for score is a pain in the ass.

[Special World]

I don't find myself overjoyed by it, but when I think about it I realize that DFK is one of my favorite Cave games. It's no Futari or Ketsui imo, but I find myself having more fun with it than ESP2, DS, or DOJ, and I play it more than Guwange or ESP1. I think it helped that I stopped caring about 1.5 and settled in with Arrange A, which is a great mode.

I do agree that it's stylistically tame, and I think that's part of the reason why it doesn't thrill me as much as it should. I don't have much hype for Black Label, but I'm looking forward to Ketsuipachi.

[Skykid]

What DragonInstall says about scoring rings true for me too. I like to be able to score well in shmups - I don't need to be great, just field a half-respectable set of digits that's earned through hard but enjoyable work.
DFK 1.5 feels like it's got all the hard work and little of the enjoyment in the scoring dept because it's so freaking thankless and the ship types are all fucked up by having no straightforward bombs. I really think the bomb implementation in the game is poor judgement on Cave's part.

Like most of you mentioned, I've been getting more kicks out of the arrange modes than 1.5 - but that really irks me for some reason. I bought it for the 1.5 experience, not the stuff they whipped up to pad out the disc. I'm feeling a little disappointed - this isn't the new Dodonpachi entry I was hoping for.

And it's pretty as they come, but shit, the game lacks character somehow. Like a sexy chick with no sense of humour.

I'm thinking/hoping the BL soundtrack puts a new spin on things for me.

[nZero]

I never thought I'd agree with Skykid about something, but based on my time with the game so far I've found 1.5 to be at best unrewarding and at worst annoying to play. Personally, I'd rather spend that energy on learning the Arrange modes (or maybe just another game entirely)

[emphatic]

Black Label is where it's at. But until then = meh is quite a fitting feeling for me too. God I hope that the BL arrange mode system isn't broken somehow.

[captpain]

Unforgiving chaining in a DonPachi series game? Can't be....

[Kiken]

Probably a contentious topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else is underwhelmed by Daifukkatsu?

I was underwhelmed when I first started playing. But the more and more I learned to chain in the game, the more enthralled I've become.

I suppose this is to do with the gaming experience. Personally, I'm struggling to find a comfortable spot with the game. I hate autobomb so Power is the only style to try to make headway in - but then I also dislike having no bombs (and having ones you collect autobomb.) It's a crappy way to balance things.

The autobomb is annoying.. in the first loop. I actually am somewhat grateful for it in the second loop though. In regards to finding a comfortable spot with the game... this is very understandable as there are 9 different craft/style combinations.. and they all have their quirks. It can be daunting to find something that feels comfortable within your specific play style... but I guess having nearly 10 "ships" to choose from means that there's a greater chance of there being one that's just right.

While I like the hidden bosses, I really dislike chaining in this game. If you foul up holding a full chain on the early stages, that's you pretty much screwed off the scoreboards.

Actually, with the chaining, the first 4 levels are not as important as stage 5.

It might be easier to hold the chain than DOJ, but in DOJ you can drop it a few times in a stage and still score well by having some decent combo building and hyper activating. In DFK, you're at the mercy (in scoring terms) of having to hold those chains steady throughout. Drop it and your score suffers so bad you may as well start over. It's painful how many times I restart the first stage, to the point where I just don't give a shit about it anymore.

That's weird, because I find the exact opposite holds true. In DFK, you have the count-down 'cushion' when you're not in Hyper Standby, resulting in a far more flexible system. You're not at the total mercy of the chain meter throughout the entire level... so long as your hyper gauge isn't full, you can afford to miss some enemies here and there.

As for the stage 1 restarts... I only do that if I screw up triggering the ura route, which can be annoying, I agree.

[BulletMagnet]

For whatever it's worth I have to put myself in the "I didn't like this as much as I'd hoped" category, but for different reasons than most:

1) I like the colorful graphics, but at the same time I register a hit to bullet visibility, which I tend to be especially sensitive to: I'm in no hurry to return to the uber-muted background (and player shot, too) style of DOJ, but at least in there you'd never mistake an enemy projectile for anything else. Here, amidst all the huge shiny bonus stars and heaven knows what else, I occasionally lose my place - not game-killing, but still annoying.

2) On a related note, Cave's stuff (and shooters in general, to a degree) are all about excess, but the best shmups (in my view) build the over-the-top stuff into the rest of the experience, not the other way around - DFK often just feels like garishness for its own sake. Depending on whether you're hypered or not, the feeling you get goes back and forth from "whoooa, I'm clearing everything out with minimal effort" to "crapcrapcrap why did I just autobomb six times in a row", with little in between - presumably more practice helps to tilt things more in the former direction, but I don't feel particularly motivated either way.

3) That last level is among the most irritating I've played in some time. I know they wanted to "balance out" the aforementioned advantage given by hypering to increase the challenge, but filling the screen with unkillable obstacles that suddenly appear from all sides without notice and cluster/spread out in similar fashion is a terrible way to do it: come on guys, Deathsmiles at least threw in enemy indicators to give you a fair chance, why abandon those here? This kind of nonsense made me grimace even in the 80's, and I thought you'd moved past that mindset for good.

I honestly am not bothered much by the chaining, the girly bosses, or even the auto-bomb, but the above still took a lot of the wind out of my sails when it came to this game - I'm still going to give Black Label a try, but I'm not nearly so excited about it as I might have been otherwise. I've liked a lot of Cave's recent stuff, too, so it's not like I've been on a "they're headed down the wrong path" rant of late, but I do hope they take a different tack than this one from here on out.

[Demetori]

Starting to think the iPhone mode is better. o-o

3) That last level is among the most irritating I've played in some time. I know they wanted to "balance out" the aforementioned advantage given by hypering to increase the challenge, but filling the screen with unkillable obstacles that suddenly appear from all sides without notice and cluster/spread out in similar fashion is a terrible way to do it: come on guys, Deathsmiles at least threw in enemy indicators to give you a fair chance, why abandon those here? This kind of nonsense made me grimace even in the 80's, and I thought you'd moved past that mindset for good.

I have to agree with this to some extent, if it's detrimental to what's about to happen next. Say, the game could at least detect where you are and give a warning that you're about to be run over.

[DragonInstall]

As much as I hate chaining stage 5 and always dropping my chain at the laser part... I think its a bit silly to complain about there being no indication of where the laser ring will pop out. It only took 2 or 3 plays in that level to know the placement of them.

[NzzpNzzp]

DFK isn't a Cave game at all, it's a Touhou game in disguise. Got the dreadfully slow bullets, got the secondary mechanic that makes the game easier, got the leaving enemies alive so they'll shoot at you more and you can get more points from their shots, got the easymode bombs, got the milking bosses for far too long, got the cast that's entirely female for no reason. Not exactly what I was looking for.

Also forcing me to choose between a fast ship and a ship which gets bombs makes me very sad.

[Kollision]

Haven't spent so much time with the game to draw any conclusion, but I was really let down by the music.

[BulletMagnet]

As much as I hate chaining stage 5 and always dropping my chain at the laser part... I think its a bit silly to complain about there being no indication of where the laser ring will pop out. It only took 2 or 3 plays in that level to know the placement of them.

I know a lot of fellow shmuppers have a higher tolerance for this than I do, but even if it's "not THAT hard" to eventually figure out I still always see it as unnecessarily poor game design (seriously, it's one of the easiest possible fixes a developer can make), and quite often lose interest. I always call to mind a related quote from Joker JUN from here:

For me, I think of what I hate when I get killed in a game, and want to take that out. For example, I would be careful to put something in where "if you don't know it, it's over". Also, I don't really go to game centers day after day, so I don't really remember patterns from games I previously played. For me, I find games you can adapt to immediately fun. I think this is something that should be done in general.

Again, not everyone is a fan of that mindset, and that's fine, but for me personally those sorts of segments just scream laziness on the developer's part (I can almost hear them say "eh, whatever, just call it 'old-school' or 'hardcore' and they'll put up with it"), and make me less willing to put in the effort they refused to implement themselves.

[cools]

Every time I've played it I've been "meh" about it.

Would love to try BL but it's just a tad pricey still.

[CStarFlare]

The thing that's frustrated me with DFK is the hidden midbosses. I like the concept, but activating stage 1's (and therefore stage 2's) has frustrated me so much that the game never clicked with me. It feels like there are a lot of specific parts that are important to pull off correctly to get any kind of non-awful score (stage 2 midboss, for example), but I have difficulty doing them correctly and it's still quite easy to lose that chain by letting the meter deplete or getting hit.

Survival between the different ship types is completely unbalanced - Bomb and Strong are almost boring thanks to autobomb+the bomb stock, but with Power I find myself in a tough spot (stage 4 boss is a bitch) losing my entire life stock because I don't have any bombs to fall back on.

I admit to having some unreasonable expectations going into it, though. I expected it to be fairly easy in the first loop (Power Style is in fact pretty tough), and it's much faster paced than I expected (the iPhone version feels much slower). Before the port hit, I was excited for 1.5 and meh on what I'd seen of Black Label. Now I'm really hopeful about BL and completely uninterested in 1.5.

[Drum]

As much as I hate chaining stage 5 and always dropping my chain at the laser part... I think its a bit silly to complain about there being no indication of where the laser ring will pop out. It only took 2 or 3 plays in that level to know the placement of them.

I know a lot of fellow shmuppers have a higher tolerance for this than I do, but even if it's "not THAT hard" to eventually figure out I still always see it as unnecessarily poor game design (seriously, it's one of the easiest possible fixes a developer can make), and quite often lose interest. I always call to mind a related quote from Joker JUN from here:

For me, I think of what I hate when I get killed in a game, and want to take that out. For example, I would be careful to put something in where "if you don't know it, it's over". Also, I don't really go to game centers day after day, so I don't really remember patterns from games I previously played. For me, I find games you can adapt to immediately fun. I think this is something that should be done in general.

Again, not everyone is a fan of that mindset, and that's fine, but for me personally those sorts of segments just scream laziness on the developer's part (I can almost hear them say "eh, whatever, just call it 'old-school' or 'hardcore' and they'll put up with it"), and make me less willing to put in the effort they refused to implement themselves.

I think you're being way too diplomatic here. At best, it's crappy game design - at worst, in a coin-op, it's a carney scam. I do not know why people try to make excuses for this stuff - why defend people who clearly don't respect you?

[ebarrett]

Come on, everyfuckinone knew about the autobombs, the mechalolis, the chaining, the bullet-cancelling hypers, the everyfuckinthing you people are complaining about, well before the port was released. If you didn't like any of it and you still bought it, congratulations: you're not just underwhelmed, you're also stupid.


Alternatively:

"bawwwww I suck at it so it sucks"

[Skykid]

Well, it ain't just me then!

My thoughts echo everything that's been said here, particularly this:

Survival between the different ship types is completely unbalanced - Bomb and Strong are almost boring thanks to autobomb+the bomb stock, but with Power I find myself in a tough spot (stage 4 boss is a bitch) losing my entire life stock because I don't have any bombs to fall back on.

I know figuring out your ship type is part of the game, and its never been an issue in something like Progear - but DFK asks a lot of the player in terms of choices. Frankly, Power is really the only mode to play if you don't do autobombing, but being bombless is just weak.

It's far from being a poor game, but it's not very accessible and it's full of balance issues and odd requirements (and even a ludicrous scorebar - those annoy me too). And if you don't trip the Ura boss on stage 1 (easily done) then it's back to start because you want to have a fair scoring opportunity along with everyone else.

My feeling is Cave have finally struck out with this one, it needed some editing and refinement. Lose some of the excess and strip it back a little to bring it more in-line with the Dodonpachi series and it would have been a fine entry.
As it stands it's like a high budget film with a third rate director (sorry Ikeda.)

Come on, everyfuckinone knew about the autobombs, the mechalolis, the chaining, the bullet-cancelling hypers, the everyfuckinthing you people are complaining about, well before the port was released. If you didn't like any of it and you still bought it, congratulations: you're not just underwhelmed, you're also stupid.


Alternatively:

"bawwwww I suck at it so it sucks"

Retarded comment of the day.
Everyone on here knows most things about shmups before they buy them, but expectation and experience are often two different things, case in point.

[Vyxx]

Come on, everyfuckinone knew about the autobombs, the mechalolis, the chaining, the bullet-cancelling hypers, the everyfuckinthing you people are complaining about, well before the port was released. If you didn't like any of it and you still bought it, congratulations: you're not just underwhelmed, you're also stupid.

i know what the car looks like. I know its specs, how it looks when I see others drive it, the price, and everyone else's opinions. I'm not sure if I'll like it or not....Maybe I should give it a test drive?

*takes test drive*
*returns car to dealership*

You - "Sorry sir, but the car just isn't for me."
Salesman - "what the hell you knew everything before you test drove it you ass!!! if you knew you wouldn't like it why waste my time???"

[flux]

Alternatively:

"bawwwww I suck at it so it sucks"

Pretty much what I got from these posts.
I think Cave did a good job at making it have something for people just trying to loop and something for people trying to go for a max score. Going for a high score requires a high degree of accuracy; I thought you people like games that required a lot of practice and skill. Maybe dropping a chain impacts your score much more on DFK, but it is also much easier to chain on this than DDP or DOJ. It's another balance- it's easier to chain but you're punished much more by dropping it.

I think the only thing I would change is to remove the bullet cancelling from the hypers. I liked how DOJ had a balance; if you want your chain to go up faster, you have to deal with more bullets on screen.

[...]and it's much faster paced than I expected (the iPhone version feels much slower).

I thought so, too. At least on the 3GS the bullet patterns are much slower even on Hard. That kind of threw me off when I first put in the 360 port.

[ebarrett]

Retarded comment of the day.

You're in your right to think it was a "retarded" comment, I guess; the same way I'm in my right to think you people bought into a hype machine you shouldn't have trusted to begin with.

You - "Sorry sir, but the car just isn't for me."
Salesman - "what the hell you knew everything before you test drove it you ass!!! if you knew you wouldn't like it why waste my time???"

Except that in this case you gave a SUV a test drive and complained it didn't drive like a sports car, or something along these lines.

[Elixir]

Yeah, I agree.

It's probably my least cared for port, right up there with Galuda II, even though I bought that out of curiosity.

As you all know, Arrange A has a freezing bug or else I'd just play that.

1.5's Ura requirements bug me for reasons already explained in this thread. Score dependence, a massive imbalanced difficulty spike without hypers, etc.

1.51 would be perfectly fine, if it weren't for the scoring system that consists entirely of bombing boss lasers. I'm glad they forced Ura loop in this though.

Arrange B is broken, but I'll actually put some time into that once they patch it. It doesn't require much skill though, it really feels like you're playing an RPG.

And well, that's the game in a nutshell, I guess. Actually, my biggest complaint is that bullet eating is stupid. It's a stupid concept used to push out an overwhelming amount of bullets which would have been otherwise impossible to dodge. It's no wonder IKD is sick of it.

[Vyxx]

As you all know, Arrange A has a freezing bug or else I'd just play that.
.

Is that the one where if you smash your face on the stick and hit every single button at the same time it freezes?

Seems plently avoidable to me

[Skykid]

Alternatively:

"bawwwww I suck at it so it sucks"

Pretty much what I got from these posts.

Is it really?

So even though people have been debating what they consider to be valid criticisms of the game's design, said points have no integrity because everyone just sucks.

Worth noting the company you're in. People on this forum know shmups very well, know Cave games like the back of their hands, and are extremely well versed in intricate scoring systems. Suggesting all arguments as to the game's flaws are invalid based on player ability is pretty ignorant point of view.

[Elixir]

As you all know, Arrange A has a freezing bug or else I'd just play that.
.

Is that the one where if you smash your face on the stick and hit every single button at the same time it freezes?

Seems plently avoidable to me

Yes because I have to avoid glitches in order to enjoy a game.

[Despatche]

yes let's avoid something that shouldn't be there in order to enjoy a game

Not exactly what I was looking for.

stop playing CAVE games