I noticed the Suguri franchise doesn't get much love anymore so I thought I'd make a thread to revive it and discuss it. I first played it nearly 20 years ago and fell in love with it and am biased by that fact. At the time it was clearly the product of a niche passion project for arcade enthusiasts and individualistic Japanese hobbyist college game makers, which was incredibly attractive to me. (I hated the vibe of AAA games during the Xbox 360 era of copy-pasted FPS shooters and the macho tough guys like Kratos. Here was a cool neat little game with anime girls flying through the sky, fighting and dodging and sometimes flirting with each other. It was perfect for me, and it seemed to escape velocity and unabashedly revel in something almost transcendental.)
**The story**: the Earth was nearly destroyed by a thousand years of war and the survivors either fled the planet, or stayed and spent a thousand years cleaning up until the planet could support vegetation, had clear water and a clear sky again. You play as a girl who helped clean up the planet until one day mysterious strange invaders came from the sky to bring war back to the planet, and she goes to stop them. (There was later a prequel called "Sora" where you instead play as a solider in the closing phases of the thousand years of war that had polluted and ruined the planet.)
**Mechanically**: it's a horizontal pattern shooter. There are 7 to 8 stages, a stage select screen, and an arcade mode, (but it sucks since some stages really call for certain weapon layouts in order to not rage at the bosses.)
There are two types of enemy attacks: destructible explosive missiles and indestructible lasers. It had a very unique mechanic where you can press a button to dash at high speed around the map, but doing so increases your "heat" bar, which adds a multiplier to the damage you take if you take damage. You can't keep abusing the dash button or you'll hit 300% multiplier and risk taking massive damage until your heat cools off.
It's nice how in Suguri you have the option to either try to destroy the guided enemy missiles and conserving your heat bar, or to use good positioning and then dodge them and let them fly past you which is equally satisfying. In a lot of bullet hell games you barely have to move to weave through a wave of projectiles, but when you play Suguri your position dances all over the screen. And once you learn the game better you get to experiment with riskier up close attacks.
If you dash you can pass through lasers safely, which is essential when the bosses fire a flurry at you, (and in the sequel can even charge your shield to recover a little damage you took in Sora.) However, if you're hit by a physical object like a missile or boulder you'll take damage even if you were dashing.
The franchise didn't have nearly as many bullets as in Touhou games, and is more forgiving if you're not trying to get a higher rank. Suguri and Sora did have some light bullet hell elements, particularly when you fought the final bosses.
**Weapon layouts** included a bazooka, a machine gun, a flamethrower, charge up weapons, bunker buster, spreads, laser spread artillery, a bullet cluster gun, guided missile barrages, a beam sword, a pile diver, traps, and even an accelerator that temporarily slows down time. (It is only unlockable if you beat the game on the highest difficulty which renders it as a useless novelty.)
There are several different weapon layouts and each one has a special move similar to a bomb across the screen but with its own unique characteristics, and you you could charge up after about a minute. (IIRC either by dashing through lasers or destroying a lot of enemies.) Using it would grant a half second of invulnerability, which could be useful as a kind of "parry" when a boss had pinned you to a wall. A typical boss fight consists of a lot of dashing to the edges or corners of the screen and hugging them as your heat climbs precariously and the enemy boss prepares his special attack. You're now on the edge of victory or death and if you don't dodge perfectly or charge your special well you're so vulnerable now that a tiny speck of paint could take a massive chunk out of your health bar.
**Stage design**: each stage is a few minutes long and consists of shooting mechanical alien drones, cleaning up projectiles and managing their numbers before they overwhelm you. You are then confronted by a robust robotic mini-boss who has a bullet hell pattern that you'll want to learn since you want to conserve your healthbar for the real boss (or to get a higher score). It takes a minute to beat it and then you fight a couple more waves of mobs, and then meet the real boss who has a short skippable dialogue and then engages you as a fellow humanoid with a similar move set and some ability to dodge your attacks. Some levels have obstacles like ground that you need to avoid as you sometimes travel underground.
**Atmosphere**: You can't possibly focus on anything except the game even for a second when there is a boss! Even pausing the game to answer the phone will throw off your rhythm and kill you when you try to come back. You have to enter the zone and if you could keep playing like this the intensity of concentration involved would fatigue you.
It was also a neat game because the BGM was like 1990s dream trance and the whole experience made you feel like you were dancing across the sky. Rainbow confetti like particles fly behind you when you dash. You play as a girl in a seifuku and most of the bosses were also highly mobile girls with similar attacks to yourself.
**Related other games:**
I played that game and the sequel, "Sora," for hundreds of hours. For me it was a very Zen like experience of getting better and better as I replayed the game on higher and higher difficulties while trying to get a higher score by not taking damage. You could get pretty far with just fast reflexes and rested nerves, but to excel you needed to learn and memorize bullet patterns
They also made 2 amazing spinoff games with PVP multiplayer called "Acceleration of Suguri" (1 & 2), which were a cross between a shmup and a fighting game. You fought one on one in circular levels with any of the characters from Suguri or Sora, and could use all of their weapons and unique special moves. (If you're familiar with "Senko no Ronde" it had similar mechanics to that but only faster, with a bigger emphasis on dodging, and without the transformations into lumbering mechas.)
Side note: There used to be a small but active community around those two multiplayer games. I even found the IRC of the translator of Suguri (who later was hired to make an official translation,) and lurked for a year while I systematically challenged over half of the players with the goal of playing every single one of them and comparing how different people played and used different strategies.
I liked playing the different AOS2 players online since they all had different favorite characters and playing styles. Some of them would dash a lot to get to better positions, while others barely did so and tried more to conserve their heat. Some preferred to keep their distance while others wanted to go up in your face and unleash their fury and they all had their own tempo. Some of the beginners were very predictable about how they would try to unload their special as soon as it was fully charged. Others were more careful or kept you guessing. After multiple matches you could start to guess one another's tendencies better and sense their tells, and then the countermeasures, fake-outs, and mind games would start as both players would cycle through different strategies. (At least that was how it was when you played with more experienced players who knew more than one trick.)
The developers later reused Suguri's characters for a fairly popular multiplayer online board game called "100% Orange Juice", (which looks like Mario Party but with cute anime girls,) and an RPG with Pokemon-like battle system called "200% Mixed Juice." If you've ever seen "100% Orange Juice" on Steam then you've seen the characters from Suguri before. It helps to be able to appreciate that game a little better and it still has an active fan base.
Although, most players are casuals who like cute things and grinding without much challenge, and they haven't and won't ever play the original shmups. The board game was temporarily made free during early COVID and it caused a bazillion players to have at least tried it, though the active fan base has been shrinking. It is still cheap enough and gets enough OC updates that it will stay online without much help from the original creative talent, who have basically outsourced develoment to Fruitbat Factory.
Ironically, the board game will probably outlast the challenging shmup for shmup fans that it sprung from! I've played the board game, but it's not what I fell in love with. I desperately want the old band to take their royalties from the board game and then develop a 3rd Suguri game. Bring back the bosses with their bullet barrages, the pretty scrolling backgrounds, the yuri bait, the mad dashing around attacks and to the safety of the edges of the screen, and the electronic dance tracks that I loved. If Orange Juice had just kept making games then perhaps they could have been another big doujin franchise like Touhou?
**Simiar games?***
I haven't really found any shmups like Suguri yet. I'm sure some games that have a similar dash mechanic must exist though. There was a shmup called "Dimension Drive" which I initially thought might be similar since you could warp across the screen to a "parallel universe", but it was nothing like it and it was sloppy! You had much less control over where you warped than when you dash in Suguri, (all you could do was warp to the other dot on the screen), and it was too easy to warp there and back and destroy yourself because of a double misclick. One finger's mistake would kill you.
(In Suguri two of your fingers would have to mess up at the same time. When you dash you'll only go forward from where you came from, meaning you can't suddenly dash backward. Not unless you moved the stick backward at the same time that you started the dash.)
If anyone does know games that are similiar to Suguri or Sora in either their mechanics or their atmosphere then please let me know.
**A retrospective look:**
Unfortunately, the graphics haven't aged well. It started as a college indie/doujin project with a 3 person team consisting only of a programmer, an artist/writer, and a musician, and I gather they went separate ways after college, took up different occupations, and the musician even moved to Europe. I fanatically checked the developer's website daily at first, but I gradually had to accept that the band fell apart after AOS2 and are probably done making games. There probably won't ever be a Suguri 3 even if it's been one of my favorite games, or even a remake of Suguri with more up-to-date graphics and resolution, and now I know how Beatles fans felt when it ended.
Finally, for anyone who is interested in trying the franchise they were localized on Steam a few years ago, though by 2 different companies which makes finding them all more confusing. I'd recommend starting with either "Sora" or "Acceleration of Suguri 2," since they both have improved graphics and mechanics. The first Suguri was much cruder and lower polygon and lower resolution, and had no improvements for the Steam release. Even though I played it more than Sora, even I can barely put up with looking at it on a 4K monitor and I have nostalgia. It would be a very hard ask to expect a newcomer to bear with it.
The Steam version of Sora was updated to have slightly wider resolution than the original old versions you might find on the internet, (enemies had to be moved further off-screen because of it.) If Sora feels a little easier on Steam it's partly because you have a little more warning and room to dance around the enemies than when it was first released. Suguri received no such treatment, and you cannot even play the Acceleration of Suguri 1 online on Steam anymore, only the second. Plainly, the localizer and publisher Rocking Android didn't provide nearly as good legacy support for Orange Juice's games as Fruitbat Factory did and I'm glad they chose the later developer.
Here is a clip of a [full arcade playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3aLK1BzY8) of Suguri from Youtube. (However, I think the [bosses from Sora](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=EV8YsS_Jua8) were more fun to watch and aged better.)