Genre: High-Speed Shmup
Developed By: 大題汁 (Daidaijiru; Orange Juice)/
Orange_Juice/
OrangeJuice
Platform: Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista*
Number of players: 1
Release Date: Comiket 69
Distribution: CD-ROM
Rating: ****** (Videogame art lol)
*- There's a sound issue in Vista where the lock-on ping that's supposed to play immediately after the reticule targets something doesn't execute. The game also freezes up if you try to play the opening video to the game and don't skip to the main menu right away.
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tl;dr version of this review
Watch
this and
this. If you cannot appreciate how awesome Suguri is in motion, then there is something wrong with you. Also, it’s coming out in the States for only 20 dollars with the excellent soundtrack already bundled with it.
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Acceleration of Suguri was the first game in this series I came across and thought it was completely wretched. I was enjoying the 360 port of Senko no Ronde at the time and people on the Internet were making direct comparisons between the two, so I gave the game a quick shot and approached AoS as though it was a Senko no Ronde clone…
… and I was playing the game completely wrong in the process. Orange Juice has as much right to stand alongside professional top-tier shmup developers because of this game, but it wasn’t until I played the first entry in this series did I realize how close I was to passing up one of the best in the genre I’ve ever played in a very long time.
The game’s title comes from the name of the character you assume the role as: Suguri. This person is no ordinary human as she’s been augmented by her father to have the ability to fly through the skies at hypersonic speeds while easily wielding weapons that should’ve been mounted on a giant robot or a gunship. These augmentations have also allowed her to never age, giving Suguri several millennia to hone her skills down to the point where she can single-handedly take down small squads of well-armed enemies and fly circles around more powerful targets until she wears them down with enough of her own firepower. And she’ll make the entire process look really, really easy despite the fact that she hates having to resort to fighting.
Getting Suguri to make it look easy, however, is nowhere near as simple as it looks. Suguri’s default weapons, for example, force her to stand still until she completes her firing animation. These pauses are usually long enough for enemy projectiles to hit her, so like in Senko no Ronde and Virtual On, she can attack cancel out of them by dashing. Except you can’t attack cancel until that specific weapon used passes the minimum amount of time needed before it’s possible to do so, and you probably timed this incorrectly by a few frames so you’re doomed to get hit by the oncoming projectile. However, you can break free from the current attack animation by using a Hyper Attack without having to use the aforementioned method, plus you’re also invincible for about three seconds the moment the Hyper Attack starts, which can also be attack cancelled after the minimum number of frames needed to pass occurs. Except you hit the wrong target because the lock-on reticule was on a different enemy. And all of this can happen in a span of 2 seconds.
So based on that description, Suguri sounds like it uses about four buttons to play the game: one to fire her weapon, one to dash, one to activate the Hyper Attack, and one to switch targets. In actuality, there’s a total of six different buttons you need to press at a moment’s notice, as there are two buttons to switch targets (one is to switch to the closest, the other is to switch to the farthest), and two different weapons to fire. However, beginners only need to know three buttons in order to survive in this game: Weapon 1, Dash, and Hyper Attack. You probably will never have to manipulate the lock-on buttons because by the time you’re used to the basics of this game, you’ll have memorized the enemy placement by then and developed strategies already on how to take out the first enemy that appears in various scenes within a given stage.
But it’s not enough to know how to fire and destroy enemies, since due to the nature of how Suguri targets and fires at the enemy, they will have more than enough time to flood the screen with their projectiles before you can destroy them all (unless you know what you’re doing, obviously). And unlike most modern danmaku shmups out there, Suguri’s enemies mean business: they will blanket the screen with firepower in such a way that it’s literally impossible to safely navigate through without getting hit at least once, which is exacerbated by the fact the hitboxes of both Suguri’s and the enemies’ projectiles are as big as they’re drawn on the screen. The Hyper Attacks won’t mitigate this problem at all since the enemies will trap her faster than she can accumulate them.
And here’s where the genius of Suguri comes into play. You see, Orange Juice has developed a rock/paper/scissors balance system involving three components: Suguri’s dash, energy projectiles, and ballistics (missiles, mines, giant pieces of flying rock or concrete, etc.). With only a few exceptions, dashing negates ALL energy-based projectiles as they tend to be the fastest moving things you’ll see in the game. Suguri can still crash into ballistics while dashing which tend to be slower to fire and move as though they’re stuck in tar compared to the other class of projectiles, but also tend to hit harder as a result. Like in other shmups, ballistics will also absorb shots and have a damage threshold, meaning that it will explode once it takes more damage than it can handle, except if the final blow was dealt by an energy-based projectile, it will continue to travel along its current trajectory.
Now this system would be completely worthless if the player didn’t have good control over Suguri’s dashes, which it does by implementing a system that’s similar to Senko no Ronde’s and removing practically all of the penalties associated with dashing. To dash, all one needs to do is press the Dash button, and if Suguri hasn’t locked onto the enemy, the default direction she’ll be heading is a straight horizontal path to the right end of the screen. When there’s an enemy that’s locked on, Suguri’s default dash trajectory will be where the target is located on the screen. The duration of Suguri’s dash will last as long as you hold the Dash button down so you can concentrate on positioning her to safely launch attacks at a target. The rest of the dash system is taken straight out of the rules from Senko no Ronde and Virtual On - Like in those games, Suguri can dash in any direction by first moving in that direction and pressing the Dash button at the same time. She can also turn in the middle of her dash by moving in the direction you want her to go to, and if this method isn’t fast enough, you can also instantly change her vector (called Watari Dashing) like one can in Senko by executing another “dash” in the middle of the current one by first moving in the direction you want her to go to and pressing the Dash button at the same time, which can even be safely done right inside cluster of energy projectiles if you’re fast enough. However, unlike Senko no Ronde or Virtual On, Suguri has more control over her dashes as she can start and stop as she pleases without having to suffer any “freeze time” penalties for doing so as long as the player’s telling her to do is just start, stop, or Watari Dash.
Another important aspect of the dash is Suguri will leave behind rainbow-colored shockwaves. If these come into contact with the enemy’s projectiles (which I’ll call grazing from now on), it will fill up slivers of the Hyper Gauge, which when full, allows Suguri to execute one Hyper Attack, essentially unleashing a powerful variation of her currently equipped weapon. The Hyper Gauge can also be filled up by dishing out damage or taking it (the latter is not a smart idea to do by the way), but since there’s always a lot of projectiles flying on the screen, grazing is the most reliable way to fill up the Hyper Gauge. And since Hyper Attacks are the game’s only “bombs,” you’d definitely want to graze enemy firepower to fill up the Hyper Gauge as much as possible, unless you’ve already maxed it out.
Now here’s where the risks of dashing come into effect. The first obvious one that you’ll encounter with dashing is that Suguri moves FAST. Fast, as in Xadlak Plus and xSynergy Gate fast (except these two games never developed a dash system that allowed you to safely navigate through traditional danmaku at high speeds, thus making it worthless). Fast, as in, she can outrun practically all of the enemy projectiles in the game. Fast, as in, it literally takes less than three seconds for her to go from the left end of the screen to the right. Not only is it FAST, but every time she starts a dash or Watari Dashes, you will be unable to control her until a split-second after she darts off in the direction you wanted her to dash to. I can assure you that this problem will go away over time, but you’re initially going to have trouble trying to position Suguri within small gaps of the enemy’s firepower just to fire off a shot from your favorite weapon and either attack cancel or Hyper Attack out of it before the next wave of bullets hits her.
The second risk of dashing is the Heat Gauge, and this will always be constant regardless of how experienced you are with the game. Every time you start a dash or Watari Dash, the Heat Gauge will jump up 25% which will continue to slowly rise from there for as long as you hold down the dash button and will gradually drop down to 0% the moment you release it. What the Heat Gauge does is scale the amount taken off from the Armor Gauge whenever Suguri’s hit by something (as she’s too cool to use lives), and once the Armor Gauge is gone, your play session is over (… what? This ain’t Senko). The Heat Gauge can rise up all the way to 300%, meaning that if Suguri’s hit at this point, she’ll be essentially taking 3 times the base damage of whatever struck her, which could result in instant death depending on how powerful the attack was. Couple this with the fact that Suguri has no means to recover any damage received for the entire stage and you can see how important it is to not take as many hits as possible, especially at high Heat levels. Now what makes the Heat system brilliant is that at higher levels of play, the player has no choice but to attack cancel as much as possible to maximize their firing rate for a majority of Suguri’s weapons, have enough time to move to the right position on the screen to safely land the next hit on their current target, and graze as much of the enemy’s firepower as possible to accumulate Hyper Attacks which will both protect Suguri and supplement her total damage output.
One final obstacle in the way of mastering the game is also something that will be less troublesome after you play the it long enough: getting hit will screw up your timing of everything, because although Suguri will be invincible for a short while after she’s hit, this window of invulnerability is only long enough for you to reposition her by dashing to a safe spot on the screen before returning fire (unless your first reaction is to execute a Hyper Attack). Most novice players will realize this only after they’ve taken three hits in a row because they will first feel the sting of the projectile’s impact on Suguri, which will then prompt them to retaliate as quickly as possible before whatever shot that projectile leaves the screen (something that most of them do very well), which then results in getting hit from another projectile, thus repeating this cycle all over again until either the player wisens up or sees their heroine disintegrate into prismatic confetti.
Those who aren’t put off by Suguri’s unforgiving learning curve in hope of one day experiencing what I was trying to describe earlier in this review will be treated to content whose quality rivals Treasure when they’re at their best. Suguri’s “Story Mode” is an idea similar to what ZUN did to Shoot the Bullet, but can be traced back to Treasure’s first Bangai-O game: you can select any stage you want, but only those that you’ve already unlocked by passing the prior one in the sequence, with each play session beginning the moment you start the selected stage and ending when you either pass it by defeating the boss or fail by dying anywhere along the way. This method encourages players to keep replaying the stages over and over either to refine their strategy and execution of them or to experiment with the new weapons (which are typically based off what the stage bosses used, so in a sense it’s kind of like Rockman) that are acquired either by completing a certain number of play sessions or by successfully passing the stages. Of course, you can choose Arcade Mode instead and play the game linearly without any breaks as well as not having the option to switch weapons between stages if you so desire, but be warned that getting killed once will still send you back to the game’s main menu.
But this idea isn’t what Treasure’s well-known for. It’s the stage layout and the boss encounters, both of which Orange Juice delivers in spades. Stage 3, for example, will start Suguri flying really fast through a canyon and fighting enemies that fire homing missiles at her, which then transitions into one of the canyon’s caves that has her dealing with a miniboss drilling tunnels in it, giving little space to maneuver around its drill bits, the rock debris it throws out in its wake, and the balls of energy it occasionally fires at her. And you have to destroy the stupid thing before you can get to the stage’s actual boss who deploys weapon pods that launch a combination of aimed enemy shots and random solid shells flying at near-dash speeds, making the already hard-as-it-is process of getting enough time to fire a shot safely at her even more difficult. The following stage has Suguri navigating through thunderclouds that shoots aimed lightning bolts at her, which could accidentally electrocute the enemies passing by and damage her in the process if you have her run into them at this point without dashing, with the miniboss being a giant machine constantly spinning around wielding flamethrowers on its tips, which, when combined with its rapid firing rate of energy projectiles, forces you into learning how to take advantage of Suguri’s Hyper Attacks or else she will never have an opportunity to fire at the thing. Destroying this miniboss ejects the stage’s boss who uses strategies like pining Suguri down with her needle-shaped ballistics that treat the edges of the screen as a wall to bounce off from so she can close in on you with a melee strike with one motion or to fly around herself extremely fast while enveloped in an energy field that will damage Suguri upon contact the screen spewing energy projectiles in the process. And that’s before she makes mirror images of herself in order to perform an attack that’s similar to the Guardian’s Knight pentagram laser formation from Thunder Force V. Oh, did I mention that the speed of her attacks are as fast as Suguri’s?
The majority of the game’s music is composed of trance, a genre I really hate because almost everyone I know who listens to the “good” stuff consist of a 20 second loop of music repeated twenty times using generic techno sounds. Despite this, DJ DEKU (simply known as DEKU as of late) has made a soundtrack that not only doesn’t annoy me after thirty seconds with its incessant bass beats, the music matches the theme of the stage very well. Green Bird, the track for the game’s first stage, starts off with a synthesized chorus and violin before moving into a piano melody which after a certain point, sounds vaguely familiar to Key’s opening theme to AIR. The tranquil melody really does a good job over the stage that Suguri’s flying through, which is a quiet forest in the middle of the afternoon that’s suddenly interrupted by an alien invasion causing a ruckus, thus ruining Suguri’s day. Another nice thing about the game’s soundtrack is that not all of it is trance. Impact is a synthesized rock track that would sound very awesome if the composer had access to real instruments and also depicts the 4th boss’ style of hitting hard and hitting fast. Difference starts dipping into Yasuhisa Watanabe territory with his signature space-age sounds right at the beginning of the track combined with a synthesized bass guitar to give you an initial impression that it’s going to sound like electronic jazz, but then merges with DEKU’s chiptune sounds and signature techno trumpet you’ve been hearing in just about every stage prior to this one.
The only complaint I have about Suguri is that it has a convoluted scoring system, but I’m actually lying as I try my hardest not to believe it exists since attempting to follow it will force me to play in a way that I’m not going to really enjoy. Yet I enjoy it somewhat, so I’m torn about this. Like in any contemporary skill-based game, you will be ranked at the end of the stage. But in order for you to get an S Rank, all the game really asks of you is to finish the stage fairly quickly with about 85% or more of the Armor Gauge remaining while gathering a small amount of Damage Points. To get a really high score however, the factor score junkies need to raise the highest is the Damage Points. To start accumulating these, you simply need to hit an enemy. When you do this, a blue meter will appear right below the Heat Gauge with a numerical value right above it displaying the total damage you’ve dealt so far without screwing up. To screw up you need to do one of two things: get hit by an enemy attack or let the meter completely empty, which the latter does pretty quickly. To prevent the meter from completely emptying, you also need to do one of two things: hit an enemy or graze their projectiles, and doing either action will completely refill the meter. The thing that will really aggravate the score junkies is that the stages will have a few empty segments that last long enough for the Damage Point Meter to completely empty before a new target comes out, so they can’t reach the theoretical maximum value of Damage Points for the stage because of this (something that the
game’s true sequel addresses, by the way). Also, in order for one to ideally maximize their Damage Points, they need to equip a weapon that deals a TON of damage on a single hit (like the Beam Bazooka) and combine it with another weapon that doesn’t deal that much damage to a target (like the Machine Gun), so can you pelt them first with the weak weapon until you know the next hit will destroy it and then overkill the target with your powerful one.
So even with that “gripe” aside, I’d definitely recommend you check out Suguri. For its original price that I usually saw it for when I was browsing Japanese online shops, 20-something dollars for an experience like this is definitely worth it. I was also going to say how easy it is to navigate through the game’s menus even though it’s in Japanese and there’s even a complete unofficial translation available for you to patch the game into English anyway, but since
Rockin’ Android picked up the rights to distribute an official American version of the game, which also packs in the series’ pseudo-sequel, Acceleration of Suguri and X-Edition (its expansion set), as well as the soundtracks for both games (which I’ve been trying to get a hold of since forever) at a price of only a measly twenty dollars, you have no excuse to not play this when it comes out over in the United States.
So save some money, buy the game (or pirate it if you’re too cheap for that), and feel what Suguri feels. Although it will be at first difficult for you, once you understand what I see, you will be unable to resist her charm, and look at every other traditional shmup with complete disdain as not only has Orange Juice produced an awesome game that’s completely different from the genre’s formula, they’ve done so with style.