My previous post about Sky Force and its progression model also made me curious about which shmups - past or present - have attempted to integrate RPG mechanics into their play?
To define what I mean when I say RPG mechanics:
Experience Points
Character Levels that open up new abilities or bonuses
Character Development: Skill Trees & Skill Advancement
Exploration or Non-linear level design
Loot / Itemization
Party System: other ships with different attributes fight alongside your ship
Very interested to know about any shooters that have attempted one or more of these things. Even more interested to know about the ones that have failed spectacularly.
Stellavanity has experience points and character levels, stat allocation, and items that can be equipped after being bought or found. The stage progression can also be non-linear. A lot of these things can be disabled for a more arcade-like experience, though.
Black Art features parties, items that can be equipped or used after being bought, and status effects. There are probably more things that I can't think of; I haven't played it much.
Cosmotank on the original GB is a pretty interesting shmup/RPG hybrid. Its execution suffers a bit from hardware limitations, but it has:
first person dungeon crawling
random encounters with first person perspective gunfights
pocky and rocky style exploration while shooting
experience points and leveling up
item collecting
proper scrolling shooter sections
areas inaccessible until other conditions are met/you've upgraded your ship with certain equipment
It's a really fascinating game that's worth looking into just to see how it was executed. I think it has a lot of potential to be remade significantly better.
Success shmups have levelling stuff usually
Sanvein - power up your shot by playing all the selectable mini levels before challenging bosses, otherwise you are too weak
Psyvariar - level up to again power up your shot, your level is compared to the level of the area you select to determine how much damage you do (you better bring a high level ship to a high level area)
Guardian Force - not sure but you can level up weapons, can't remember if it was RPG-like or not
"In RPG, you level up character. In STG, character level you!
What a message board!"
--attributed to Y. Smirnoff
All shooting games are roleplaying games. You build your skills, collect equipment that matches your skill set (arcade sticks, etc), buy from cursed sellers, explore obscure websites for strategy, and constantly fight the same enemies.
Lordgalvar-II wrote:
All shooting games are roleplaying games. You build your skills, collect equipment that matches your skill set (arcade sticks, etc), buy from cursed sellers, explore obscure websites for strategy, and constantly fight the same enemies.
amdiggywhut wrote:Does Jamestown fit the bill here? Never played it but it thought it had a shop system. Was planning to get it for PS4 eventually.
Jamestowns shop is more for unlocking features like mission mode and extra difficulties than it is unlocking things you use in actual gameplay. Only exception being the extra ships you can unlock in it.
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................
Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
Appreciate the avalanche of replies, guys. Thank you. A bunch of games I have never heard of and will need to hunt down. I suppose I can get emulators for more than a few in that list.
And thanks for linking that other thread, Eno. Will check it out soon!
Various Western shooters attempt this with usually not-too-balanced results but Karous is one of the few games that I think really pulled it off well. Linley Henzell made a couple freeware shooters in a very similar vein to it called Garden of Colored Lights and White Butterfly.
There's also the Cotton series where you collect items from enemies to power up your main weapon. Mystic Riders does something similar too.
Of course, that's just an opinion. Always seeking netplay fans to play emulated arcade games with.
You have 3 different magic weapons. Any time you deal damage with them you gain experience points and when you level up you gain a skill point. At the end of the stage you can use your accumulated skill points to level up your magic weapons any way you choose. It's pretty pure RPG progression in an otherwise traditional shmup.
I also recently played a Famicom game called Super Star Force where you travel across time in order to change the future. The stages are all traditional vertical scrolling stages, but you gain time points for killing enemies that will open up paths to the past or the future. If you change something in the past it will have an impact on the future, so you don't progress from one stage to the next, rather, you go back and forth. There are shops you can enter, and also dungeons where your character walks on foot Zelda style. It's a pretty ambitious game for Famicom actually, but unfortunately while the STG portion of the game and the general concept are quite good, the actual dungeon crawling plays pretty badly.
Also on NES you have The Guardian Legend, which is a similar hybrid shmup/adventure game, but GL seems to focus more on it's adventure sections while Star Force focuses more on the shooting.
Capcom's Forgotten Worlds PCB, the classic PC Engine Super CD-Rom² shmup of Winds of Thunder/Lords of Thunder & PCE Magical Chase all have shops to visit to buy various power-up/upgrades.
PC Engine Fan X! wrote:Capcom's Forgotten Worlds PCB, the classic PC Engine Super CD-Rom² shmup of Winds of Thunder/Lords of Thunder & PCE Magical Chase all have shops to visit to buy various power-up/upgrades.
PC Engine Fan X! ^_~
See also Trouble Witches/Trouble Witches NEO (PC/Arcade/X360). **beaten by chempop**
Guess there's also Sol Divide with it's meter building for magic strength.
chempop wrote:Games with Experience Point:
Radiant Silvergun
Batsugun
Guardian Legend also applies here. Your points are actually tied to your max health, every time you reach a certain score you get a max HP increase (in addition to being able to find max HP+ items), so you can technically grind for health if you want... though there's a fatal bug where the game crashes if you counterstop it so scoring too high can actually be bad! To do that though takes way more grinding than you'd ever need by playing the game normally.
I should mention that, while it's not something that happens during gameplay, and it's tacked on the DC version, Mars Matrix also has a shop. Your points become dollars (or whatever). The only real interesting things you can buy, though, are the score attack mode (practice mode, essentially), and the Strategy videos. Other than that, there's the gallery (which is kinda cool), lives (up to 7), and continues (up to Freeplay). You don't actually have to use either. There's also some options for ship speed, shield meter recharge time, and combo time (for chaining), which only work in the Elite Modes (Elite Mode B is almost the same as the Arcade mode, while A is an arrange mode).
