Ikaruga
Posted: July 2nd, 2018, 10:27 pm
I think it's about time.
For me, the past twelve months in gaming has been very much a deeper and deeper love affair with shmups. I can partly attribute this to getting a One S last year and finding quite a few big names and assorted corkers either on backwards compatibility or on regular release. Mostly the former. I also started to visit Arcade Club in Bury semi-regularly and was thoroughly amazed by Ketsui, Armed Police Batrider and - more than anything I'd played in a long long time - Dodonpachi DaiOuJou (not that I knew what any of them were until six months ago). I would look forward to playing these strange intense impossible overwhelming shoot em ups, all in Japanese, without any idea of how to play them or even how the danmaku genre worked. Every visit, I would credit feed my way through at least one of them and feel like an absolute champ, despite the utter pointlessness of doing this.
At home, I started to get into Guwange (not knowing it was a Cave game, too) and I put in a few hours into both Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. Honestly, I thought the idea was simply to get to the end of the game and while I was aware of the Ikaruga chain system, I was not used to playing for score and found the idea quite boring. This is genuinely shocking to me now, like when an album really gets under your skin but you couldn't possibly understand it the first twenty times and now you can't remember how you ever even felt like that, or how your mind was so closed. That's how I feel about shmups, and very specifically how I feel about Ikaruga. But more in a moment.
Meanwhile, I started to pick up anything and everything STG on the Switch. We're talking Gunbird, Samurai Aces, Zero Gunner 2, Blazing Star, Strikers 1945, Tengai, and even the largely shit curios like Sol Divide. I was becoming quite obsessed with the genre, and the Psikyo games in particular were really floating my boat. I think it was the relative simplicity - blow everything up, clear the screen. While I'm sure they have their own complex scoring systems, they are more straightforward examples of the genre. Dodge the bullets, send a hell of a lot more back. My Switch became a shoot em up machine for a good while and I felt like I had a glorious arcade in my hands. Not long after, I decided to investigate emulation and Steam and was surprised to find that my creaking laptop could run Dodonpachi DaiOuJou, Mushihimesama, Ketsui, Crimzon Clover and much more and I dove deeper into the genre and started to ruin my sleep patterns watching superplays in bed, sneaking into the spare room so as not to wake my wife and being unable to fall asleep, my mind dancing with the cascading 'curtains' of bullet patterns being herded this way and that. It was a glorious few weeks - until my laptop died of exhaustion during the April heatwave.
I had few fond memories of Ikaruga. I had played it on my mate's Dreamcast way back on release, along with Radiant Silvergun, and I had found it weird, confusing and disorienting. It was also bloody hard. I preferred Radiant Silvergun because the weapon synergies were pretty cool. That was the limit of my appreciation. Fast forward to last year's XBox BC playthrough and while I was enjoying the genre, Ikaruga did relatively very little for me. It seemed like a puzzle game, even playing pure survival and ignoring the scoring mechanics. It was just absurdly difficult and I kept dying to the bullets I generated by killing enemies. It seemed much easier to just not shoot anything!
I didn't especially anticipate the Switch release then but I did realise that if I were ever to give the game a fair crack, it would be on this system. Playing in bed or on the couch, having a quick bash at a level and then sleep. Yep, it all seemed more promising and more palatable. And I did soon enjoy it much more than I had ever done before. I beat the first boss on my first go! I got up to the second a few goes later. Yes, I was getting into it. 600k high score. I'm making progress. 800k. Huh, getting better. Quick check of the leaderboards...
Four million?
On the first level?!
I don't really know why I suddenly cared. Even when I was learning DaiOuJou, I wasn't really playing for score as much as enjoying clearing the screen and increasing my chances of staying alive. I'd heard things about Ikaruga though which made me question my experience of the game, I'd heard about the chains and the puzzle elements of the scoring not just the survival. It had put me off, to be honest, as I say. Suddenly, though, I had a glimpse of what the game really was, and what the potential was, what my potential might be. I checked the Friends leaderboard and saw that quite a few of my Switch friends were comfortably ahead of me. Maybe that was it, the old competitive spirit. I wanted to at least break a million.
So I started to experiment with the scoring systems. I knew I could study some superplays (and I had seen at least one on Ikaruga, it just hadn't made much of an impression besides switching polarity to stay alive) but I wanted to see what I could figure out for myself:
Off we go. Hmm. Bollocks. Dead. OK, again. Just watch. Six whites, six blacks, six whites, six blacks. Ah, OK. Start right, go left, then right again...I see. Heh. Clever. It's like a rhythm game. Now try to shoot them with the same colour and...charge up the energy bar. Nice. What the hell is this now? Forget it. Three columns on each side, white and black, how am I meant to get all them before they go? Impossible. Ugh, this is infuriating. Oh, err, the energy bar. Hmm. If I can take out the whites fast enough. Maybe...Shit, that actually worked. Take out the whites in black polarity, missile the blacks. Quality. That actually works. And hold on, I can scoop up the black bullets which burst across the screen and recharge and...fuck me...I can missile the next wave without even shooting...and...scoop up those bullets, too...
And that's how it started. I am now obsessed with Ikaruga. What an incredibly elegant, beautiful anomaly it is. I finally got the 1 million on the first chapter and I've been chipping away ever since, linking sections together, thinking about my route when I'm in work or driving or before bed, on the bog, when cooking. It's such a delicate intricate puzzle to gently unlock, trying to eke an extra chain out of your strategy before realising the entire strategy is doomed to fail and heading back for a more ambitious pass at a familiar wave. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to get a B++ with 1.6m on the first chapter, and I was stuck there for a good while. I started to feel I was going backwards, in fact.
This past couple of weeks, I've been playing every night, locking some easier sections into muscle memory and being able to experiment and practise and practise and fail and fail but sometimes see some potential. I still have a long long way to go. Some sections I largely ignore for fear of destroying my chain. Last night, I finally made the next little step up. 1.987 million. Painfully close. I played for another hour before bed and just slid further and further backwards. Tonight, finally, I did it. The 4+2 white, then 4+2 black, then straight into the B/W mini bosses with the satellite ships rotating around them. Chain, chain, chain, chain. The big ships with the little columns of descending ships to jink in and out of. I'll skip them for now, just take down the big bastards, keep this chain going, I knew it was a good run. Bang, down. Bang, down. One more, down. Mad rush, chain the turrets and...not quite. Still, I'm onto the boss with nearly 1.5m on the board already. Max energy bar, missile, instant phase two. Black, sit on that shield, absorb absorb absorb, bang, full missile. Phase three. Switch, switch, switch, missile. White homing beams, absorb absorb absorb, black, missile.
Holy shit.
Now, this is nothing. It doesn't even place me at the top of my friend list for the chapter, but it is a real gaming achievement for me. And the best thing is that I have so so much more to learn about this game. In a year, I will likely look back on this and chuckle. At least, I really hope I do. It's been extraordinarily satisfying and I can't wait to peel back the next layer. For context, I think the maximum chain for the first chapter is roughly double what I've got there and that says it all. I'll very likely never ever achieve that. I might have already hit my limit. I also acknowledge that this thread is tragically self-indulgent but I have cherished the experience of falling in love with this game so much, I just wanted to put it into words. If anyone is doubtful of the beauty of Ikaruga, please do have another look because it has so much to give. I was wrong. I was a fool. It is glorious.
For me, the past twelve months in gaming has been very much a deeper and deeper love affair with shmups. I can partly attribute this to getting a One S last year and finding quite a few big names and assorted corkers either on backwards compatibility or on regular release. Mostly the former. I also started to visit Arcade Club in Bury semi-regularly and was thoroughly amazed by Ketsui, Armed Police Batrider and - more than anything I'd played in a long long time - Dodonpachi DaiOuJou (not that I knew what any of them were until six months ago). I would look forward to playing these strange intense impossible overwhelming shoot em ups, all in Japanese, without any idea of how to play them or even how the danmaku genre worked. Every visit, I would credit feed my way through at least one of them and feel like an absolute champ, despite the utter pointlessness of doing this.
At home, I started to get into Guwange (not knowing it was a Cave game, too) and I put in a few hours into both Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. Honestly, I thought the idea was simply to get to the end of the game and while I was aware of the Ikaruga chain system, I was not used to playing for score and found the idea quite boring. This is genuinely shocking to me now, like when an album really gets under your skin but you couldn't possibly understand it the first twenty times and now you can't remember how you ever even felt like that, or how your mind was so closed. That's how I feel about shmups, and very specifically how I feel about Ikaruga. But more in a moment.
Meanwhile, I started to pick up anything and everything STG on the Switch. We're talking Gunbird, Samurai Aces, Zero Gunner 2, Blazing Star, Strikers 1945, Tengai, and even the largely shit curios like Sol Divide. I was becoming quite obsessed with the genre, and the Psikyo games in particular were really floating my boat. I think it was the relative simplicity - blow everything up, clear the screen. While I'm sure they have their own complex scoring systems, they are more straightforward examples of the genre. Dodge the bullets, send a hell of a lot more back. My Switch became a shoot em up machine for a good while and I felt like I had a glorious arcade in my hands. Not long after, I decided to investigate emulation and Steam and was surprised to find that my creaking laptop could run Dodonpachi DaiOuJou, Mushihimesama, Ketsui, Crimzon Clover and much more and I dove deeper into the genre and started to ruin my sleep patterns watching superplays in bed, sneaking into the spare room so as not to wake my wife and being unable to fall asleep, my mind dancing with the cascading 'curtains' of bullet patterns being herded this way and that. It was a glorious few weeks - until my laptop died of exhaustion during the April heatwave.
I had few fond memories of Ikaruga. I had played it on my mate's Dreamcast way back on release, along with Radiant Silvergun, and I had found it weird, confusing and disorienting. It was also bloody hard. I preferred Radiant Silvergun because the weapon synergies were pretty cool. That was the limit of my appreciation. Fast forward to last year's XBox BC playthrough and while I was enjoying the genre, Ikaruga did relatively very little for me. It seemed like a puzzle game, even playing pure survival and ignoring the scoring mechanics. It was just absurdly difficult and I kept dying to the bullets I generated by killing enemies. It seemed much easier to just not shoot anything!
I didn't especially anticipate the Switch release then but I did realise that if I were ever to give the game a fair crack, it would be on this system. Playing in bed or on the couch, having a quick bash at a level and then sleep. Yep, it all seemed more promising and more palatable. And I did soon enjoy it much more than I had ever done before. I beat the first boss on my first go! I got up to the second a few goes later. Yes, I was getting into it. 600k high score. I'm making progress. 800k. Huh, getting better. Quick check of the leaderboards...
Four million?
On the first level?!
I don't really know why I suddenly cared. Even when I was learning DaiOuJou, I wasn't really playing for score as much as enjoying clearing the screen and increasing my chances of staying alive. I'd heard things about Ikaruga though which made me question my experience of the game, I'd heard about the chains and the puzzle elements of the scoring not just the survival. It had put me off, to be honest, as I say. Suddenly, though, I had a glimpse of what the game really was, and what the potential was, what my potential might be. I checked the Friends leaderboard and saw that quite a few of my Switch friends were comfortably ahead of me. Maybe that was it, the old competitive spirit. I wanted to at least break a million.
So I started to experiment with the scoring systems. I knew I could study some superplays (and I had seen at least one on Ikaruga, it just hadn't made much of an impression besides switching polarity to stay alive) but I wanted to see what I could figure out for myself:
Off we go. Hmm. Bollocks. Dead. OK, again. Just watch. Six whites, six blacks, six whites, six blacks. Ah, OK. Start right, go left, then right again...I see. Heh. Clever. It's like a rhythm game. Now try to shoot them with the same colour and...charge up the energy bar. Nice. What the hell is this now? Forget it. Three columns on each side, white and black, how am I meant to get all them before they go? Impossible. Ugh, this is infuriating. Oh, err, the energy bar. Hmm. If I can take out the whites fast enough. Maybe...Shit, that actually worked. Take out the whites in black polarity, missile the blacks. Quality. That actually works. And hold on, I can scoop up the black bullets which burst across the screen and recharge and...fuck me...I can missile the next wave without even shooting...and...scoop up those bullets, too...
And that's how it started. I am now obsessed with Ikaruga. What an incredibly elegant, beautiful anomaly it is. I finally got the 1 million on the first chapter and I've been chipping away ever since, linking sections together, thinking about my route when I'm in work or driving or before bed, on the bog, when cooking. It's such a delicate intricate puzzle to gently unlock, trying to eke an extra chain out of your strategy before realising the entire strategy is doomed to fail and heading back for a more ambitious pass at a familiar wave. I can't tell you how thrilled I was to get a B++ with 1.6m on the first chapter, and I was stuck there for a good while. I started to feel I was going backwards, in fact.
This past couple of weeks, I've been playing every night, locking some easier sections into muscle memory and being able to experiment and practise and practise and fail and fail but sometimes see some potential. I still have a long long way to go. Some sections I largely ignore for fear of destroying my chain. Last night, I finally made the next little step up. 1.987 million. Painfully close. I played for another hour before bed and just slid further and further backwards. Tonight, finally, I did it. The 4+2 white, then 4+2 black, then straight into the B/W mini bosses with the satellite ships rotating around them. Chain, chain, chain, chain. The big ships with the little columns of descending ships to jink in and out of. I'll skip them for now, just take down the big bastards, keep this chain going, I knew it was a good run. Bang, down. Bang, down. One more, down. Mad rush, chain the turrets and...not quite. Still, I'm onto the boss with nearly 1.5m on the board already. Max energy bar, missile, instant phase two. Black, sit on that shield, absorb absorb absorb, bang, full missile. Phase three. Switch, switch, switch, missile. White homing beams, absorb absorb absorb, black, missile.
Holy shit.
Now, this is nothing. It doesn't even place me at the top of my friend list for the chapter, but it is a real gaming achievement for me. And the best thing is that I have so so much more to learn about this game. In a year, I will likely look back on this and chuckle. At least, I really hope I do. It's been extraordinarily satisfying and I can't wait to peel back the next layer. For context, I think the maximum chain for the first chapter is roughly double what I've got there and that says it all. I'll very likely never ever achieve that. I might have already hit my limit. I also acknowledge that this thread is tragically self-indulgent but I have cherished the experience of falling in love with this game so much, I just wanted to put it into words. If anyone is doubtful of the beauty of Ikaruga, please do have another look because it has so much to give. I was wrong. I was a fool. It is glorious.