Detana!! TwinBee (PSP) Review

Detana!! TwinBee (PSP) Review

Release Date: 21 February 1991 (Arcade)

Date Played: 5 December 2021

Introduction:

This was the second arcade game released in the TwinBee franchise which was extremely popular in Japan.  The game received several ports that were also only released in Japan and we're looking at the Playstation Portable Version here. It was released on a compilation of most of the TwinBee games and is considered an arcade perfect port. Even though there was TwinBee fever in Japan for well over a decade, the games never really made it to the United States (other than the rebranded, "Stinger" on the NES).  Even today, you have to import these games to have the opportunity to play them.  This is, of course, what I did to to get the PSP compilation.  

The TwinBee franchise has a lot of story and lore associated with it.  It centers around the main characters having to fight Queen Melody and Archduke Nonsense for a magical harp... or something.  I'm not sure, and it doesn't really matter.  Just be aware that all of the characters in this franchise are quite beloved in their native Japan and have spawned a whole assortment of collectables, plushies, cartoons, comic books, food, action figures, radio dramas, and everything else you could imagine.  This game has plenty of cut scenes between the levels to fill you in on the story. Unfortunately, I don't speak Japanese and can't get a good grasp of what is going on. I know that the TwinBee games are considered to be an anime in shmup form series, but that interests me far less than the series fanatics.

Presentation:

The game is gorgeous with bright colors, interesting enemy and boss designs, and a light hearted feel. You can see that it draws its inspirations heavily from Studo Ghibli's move Castle in the Sky. It is definitely a cute 'em up and has playful characters and enemies that look like they're taken directly from Hayao Miyazaki's mind. I think this was a really good idea and helps this game stand out from others in the franchise that all seem to be based off of toys and candy.  The music is outstanding and has that cartoony and whimsical feel that suits it quite well and is a standard feature in the series.  Being the 5th overall game in the series but only the 2nd arcade game, the graphics have been given a huge bump from the previous 3 console only releases and it really shows. While not as technically or graphically impressive as some of the TwinBee games that came after it, Detana!! TwinBee can certainly hold its own in the aesthetic department.

Gameplay:

Unfortunately, this leads us to the real downfall of the TwinBee series. My favorite quote to offer up when asked about these games is, "Everything is great about TwinBee except for the gameplay." Of all the games I've ever played, there are none that I so desperately want to enjoy as much as the TwinBee games... but just utterly despise playing. Detana!! is pretty much the same as all of the other TwinBee games and is just a vertically scrolling shmup.  You play through 7 colorful levels that have mid-bosses and final bosses.  Some of these final bosses have really cool designs that are primarily aquatically themed with jelly fish, crabs, and ships. You're given a charge shot this time around and learning to find time to charge it and knowing when to let loose is one of the main gameplay mechanics. Everything else about the gameplay is just standard TwinBee stuff.  Meaning... it's bad.  I know, I know, up until now I've been giving the game a pretty glowing review.  So, if you thought you were going to hear me herald the greatness of these games... you thought wrong.   The TwinBee series seems like something I would absolutely love, but it's marred by such an incredibly terrible game design feature/flaw that it squarely places itself into the top echelon of most frustrating video game experiences I've ever encountered.  Like the other games in the series, it feels like it has gone out of its way to select elements from other games that intentionally frustrate me... and I feel personally attacked and offended.   Allow me to explain in detail further.

The real issue with the TwinBee games (including this one) is the powerup system.  Scattered all throughout the levels are clouds that, when shot, toss out a bell that falls towards the bottom of the screen.  What you're supposed to do is shoot the bell to juggle it and keep it from falling off the bottom of the screen.  After several shots, the bell will change colors and act as a powerup if you collect it.  These powerups include spreadshots, speed increases, shields, options, and more.  The issues with this system aren't minor and they basically control and ruin the entire experience.  Firstly, you don't know what color/powerup the bell is going to change into.  So, if you need a specific powerup, you might have to shoot the bell 20 or 30 times to get it to cycle to the one you need.  Secondly, if you get the bell to cycle to the color you want, and then you accidentally shoot it again, say goodbye to that powerup because just a single shot will turn the powerup back into a regular bell and you'll have to do it all again. Thirdly, you usually have a handful of bells on the screen that you're juggling simultaneously.  Trying to get one to stay the color you want without without accidentally hitting it again is so difficult to maintain with all of the other bells bouncing around. Fourthly, the bells block your shots when you hit them.  This game has an insane amount of enemies zipping all over the screen.  Most of them try to kamikaze directly into you and when they come into view, you can't even shoot them because there are 5 or 6 bells directly between you and them that block your bullets. These enemies also have very erratic patterns that were designed to basically troll you.  Lastly, you spend so much of your time and attention dealing with these stupid bells that you don't even get to focus on playing the rest of the game.  Ninety percent of your deaths will just come out of nowhere from an enemy you didn't even notice because all of your attention is elsewhere.  The game has terrible Gradius syndrome, meaning that if you die and lose your powerups, the game is too difficult to continue.  So, you essentially have to finish the game without ever dying to have a chance.  Because this game is so unforgivingly difficult, you die all the time.  This leads you to have to focus on getting more powerups to have a chance, which leads to spending more time juggling bells, and less time allocated to learning the levels and enemy patterns.  In addition to this, most of the TwinBee games have a Xevious mechanic where you have to bomb ground units with your crosshair while simultaneously dealing with the stuff in the air.  I'm not a fan of this mechanic usually, but it's extra bad in this series.  Because most of your movement is focused on staying below these bells to either keep shooting them or to catch them, it's difficult to take out the ground units at all.  Luckily, this game allows you to bomb the ground and shoot in the air with the same button.  Even with this little upgrade, it doesn't help the situation in any meaningful way.

In regards to the shot, as mentioned before, this game is focused on charge attacks.  They are essential to success in this game and the four different options give some variety and strategy on different ways to tackle the levels and bosses.  Unfortunately, even this carries with it some serious negatives.  Because you charge your shot by holding down your fire button, there's no autoshot in this game.  You'll wear out your hand from constantly tapping the fire button.  It's exhausting and makes the game more of a chore to play.  The charge shots themselves pass through everything on the screen... including the bells.  So, that sorts out the bells blocking your shot problem to some minor degree.  But, what it introduces is the extremely troublesome issue of your charge shot hitting bells multiple times as it passes through them and causes them to cycle past the upgrades you need.  After you die, you can't even use the charge shot when you need to because it will prevent you from grabbing any upgrades.  Considering the enemy encounters are centered around the charge shot, this can be very problematic. There are so many times where I'm repeatedly shooting a bell and trying to get it to cycle to a powerup that I desperately need, and some stupid enemy will fly in at lightning speed and fire off a barrage of fast bullets right into my path that causes me to have to dodge and miss my chance to grab the bell powerup. You spend all of this time working on shooting these bells and a majority of the time it's all for nothing because you can't grab the bell when you need to, you don't have a chance to shoot it enough times to cycle to what you need, or you accidentally shoot it when it IS on the powerup you need because of an enemy getting in your way.

Conclusion:

I don't think the TwinBee games are good.  In fact, I think they're downright bad, unfun, unfair, and miserable to play... but they have an endearing charm to them that raises my opinion of them slightly. This entry in the series is one of the worst offenders and, despite its fantastic presentation, is grating to experience.   The other games in the series are annoying, but just mediocre when all is said and done.  This one's aesthetic can't even raise it to mediocre status nor save it from being slightly despised in my eyes.  I can't help but think that Japan was more in love with the cutesy characters from the series than they were the actual gameplay.  I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to actually learning this game well enough to 1 credit clear it on even the normal difficulty.  There wasn't more than just a few seconds of enjoyment that I experienced during my time with this game.  If you've ever played a Konami shooter like Gradius, you'll be very familiar with the fact that they LOVE to recycle content over an over. In that series, you'll have the same volcano levels, Moai heads, solar flares, and speed levels. It makes the games hard to distinguish from each other. Since TwinBee is also developed by Konami, it's the same case here. All of these games recycle content and are almost indistinguishable from each other. Since Konami decided to recycle some content for this game, I decided to do the same. I was reading through one of my older reviews about a TwinBee game, and realized that it was basically just the same review for this game. So, I copied and pasted over a lot of my feelings for that game to this game... and it seemed to fit perfectly. If you've played one TwinBee game, you've played them all.

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score 4/10 (Bad)

 

Dimension Drive (PS4) Review

 

Dimension Drive (PS4) Review

Release Date: 7 December 2017

Date Played: 19 November 2021

Dimension Drive is a vertical shmup developed by 2Awesome Studio that really tries to innovate on the same old formula we've seen again and again in shooters.  They took the tried and true method that has worked for the last 3 decades and threw it out of the window to usher in a challenging and brain melting new concept that is actually more of a puzzle game than a shooter. 

It's the year 6545 and you play as Jack, an orphaned girl from a destroyed planet, who has fled her pursuers by jumping to a different dimension.  These pursuers called the Ashjul are warmongering villains who will only be satisfied by not only conquering the known universe, but ALL universes.  They have recently jumped into the dimension where Jack is currently living and begun their campaign.  Jack, who is armed with a special ship, the Manitcore, that can jump at will between two dimensions sets out to fend off and destroy the Ashjul empire while protecting her friends along the way.  

You may have noticed that I spent more time talking about the story in this shmup far more than I normally do. The reason for this is because the developers have really tried to create a fully fleshed out story with interesting characters.  This, of course, is an oddity for a shmup and is rarely attempted and usually glossed over.  The reason for this is because the story in a shooter often feels forced and serves as nothing more than a distraction from the focus of the game... which is the gameplay.  Unfortunately, this is also the case for Dimension Drive.  Between every stage, we're given an animated series of static screens with dialog in the form of text at the bottom of the screen.  These cut scenes go on for far too long and really feel like more of a nuisance more than anything.  I personally didn't find the character's art style or their personalities to be that engaging or interesting and I eventually lost interest in the plot all together.  If I were to describe it, I would say it has the depth of a Saturday morning cartoon.  

As for the gameplay...  oh, the gameplay.  I'm not going to beat around the bush, I hated almost every second I spent with Dimension Drive.  I don't know if I'm just too stupid to get the hang of the gameplay or if it's just poor design; but, I could never get into the flow of playing this game and eventually rage quit and almost threw my controller.  I'm shocked this happened and I don't remember ever getting this frustrated or angry playing a game EVER.  Now, I'm not the best gamer of all time and never claimed to be. But, in terms of similar games, I have 1 credit cleared Ikaruga, Ketsui, and Mushihimesama Futari (all considered to be some of the hardest shmups ever made) and I never came close to being as frustrated with those games as I was with this one. So, what's the issue with this game? Basically, it's just that the mechanics are so mind scrambling that I could never get the hang of them. Let me lay it all out for you in a way where you can get a glimpse into what it's like to play this game without actually having to play it yourself.  I would never want to subject anyone to such a curse.

The screen is split into 2 separate playfields; one on the right, and one on the left.  You essentially have to play both screens at the same time.  Your ship exists on only 1 screen at any given moment, but the enemies and hazards for both screens are always progressing whether your currently on that screen or not. You press a button to jump from one screen to the other and this is the main mechanic of the game.  The screens don't match and there are different enemies, bullets, and barriers on the two screens at the same time. You have to try to focus on the screen you're currently playing, but you need to be mindful of the other one at the same time because you never know when you're going to have to warp over there. You'll be constantly flipping back and forth between the two dimensions to maneuver your way through the hails of bullets and to sneak around barriers that will cause you to crash. The whole experience is like trying to carry on two conversations at once.  You try to focus on listening intently to one person while also trying to catch the gist of what the other person is saying.  Anyone who's every been to a party an experienced this nightmare knows exactly what I'm talking about. It isn't fun, and no one ever wants to do it. You may ask yourself, "what's stopping you from mainly staying on one side all of the time and ignoring the other side?"  Well, you have an energy gauge that depletes as you shoot. When it's empty, you can no longer fire.  The only way to refill it is by collecting green orbs from fallen enemies or by switching to the other dimension for a little bit while the gauge for the other side recharges. So, if you stay one one side for too long, you're forced by the game to jump to the other side. Having to keep track of this energy bar becomes a huge focus of the game and sucks the life right out of the whole shooting experience.  Luckily, it doesn't even matter that much because shooting the enemies and dodging their bullets isn't really the focus of this game.  Instead, the developers decided to make the meat and potatoes of the game be centered around avoiding walls and other obstacles by having to carefully position yourself in the correct dimension so you can circumvent a collision in the wrong dimension.  This makes the game feel like Velocity X2 , another similar game that had you teleporting around the screen to avoid obstacles.  It, too, felt more like a puzzle game than a shmup and I didn't care for it either.  But, at least in that game, you could focus your eyes on the same screen without having to dart your eyes back and forth to see what's going on like in this game.  Having to deal with teleporting between the two different dimensions was miserable and I didn't like it at all. You're given some shields that negate a few hits from bullets and laser beams, but they don't help when you broadside a wall.  If you want to know what it feels like to do this, toss a ball up and down repeatedly with one hand while trying to type at a keyboard with your other hand.  Keep your eyes focused on the ball while trying to type out the lyrics to your favorite song.  But, every time you type the letter R, you have to switch your eyes over to look at the keyboard for 5 seconds while keeping the ball tossing going and never missing a beat on the keyboard.  Try it, I dare you.

In addition to this, as you progress into the game, you unlock EVEN MORE mechanics that throw additional wrenches into the gears of any fun you may have.  The first of these is the ability to slow down and flip your ship around to shoot behind you.  At first, I thought that this might make things easier and would work like slamming on the breaks before you crash into another wall.  But, instead the game starts adding in this remarkably stupid mechanic of having to shoot switches that are scattered around the levels and that unlock doors blocking your way.  Often you'll be focused on playing in one dimension and you'll come to a dead end where you'll be forced to teleport over to the other side, turn backwards, shoot the switch, turn back round, then teleport back to the other side to continue.  This sort of thing is constantly going on and it's so brain scrambling to me that I was constantly panicking and making careless mistakes. 

Let's talk about these mistakes a little more.  Truthfully, I don't think I EVER died to an enemy or an enemy shot.  Instead I would constantly die by teleporting to the other screen while my ship was in the middle of a wall or something which results in instant death and sends you back to a checkpoint.  Or, I would quite often think I was playing on one screen while I was actually over on the other one and I would accidentally crash into a wall.  Many other times, I would be in the middle of a situation where I'm having to perform a bunch of teleports and ship flips while fending off enemies and I would accidentally press the teleport button instead of the flip button (or visa versa) and crash into another wall.  I could NOT keep the controls straight and I could never get the hang of things.  Even after HOURS of playing this game, I only marginally improved.  Just when I thought I was getting better, the game would throw another new mechanic at me and all of my hard work would be thrown out of the window.  I know there are people out there who really enjoyed this game, but I cannot figure out why. Also, I know there are a lot of people out there that really didn't stick with the game for very long and became just as frustrated as I did.  How do I know this?  Well, after I finished the 5th of 20 stages (just a quarter of the way through the game), I unlocked a trophy for making it that far and only 8% of the people who had ever played Dimension Drive had also progressed up to this point and unlocked that same trophy.  How long did it take me to unlock this trophy?  About 30 minutes. That means that 92% of the people who played this game didn't even make it half an hour into it.  If that doesn't tell you something about how frustrating this game is, I don't know what will.

As for the aesthetics, like I mentioned earlier, have a very Saturday morning cartoon look to them. This is especially true for the still frame cut scenes.  The gameplay itself is pretty uninspired and is just basic 3D models with nothing that really stands out.  There's nothing in terms of visuals to give the game any character and the whole art design falls very flat.  This is in direct contrast to the game's soundtrack which is actually outstanding.  Stages 1-2 and 1-4, in particular, have some rocking and catchy melodies and hooks. It's nice to hear some guitar based music in a sci-fi game instead of the typical EDM music that's been so prevalent recently.  I'm glad the game came with a copy of the soundtrack because I actually want to listen to these songs again outside of the game.  In my opinion, quality of the music is the only positive I have to say about the game. 

I made it about half way through the game before rage quitting.  I got stuck at one spot and I tried over and over to get past it without success.  The problem is that I knew EXACTLY what I had to do to succeed and I just couldn't muster the coordination to do it.  I would keep looking at the wrong screen, accidentally press the wrong button, or brush against a wall causing my ship to explode.  I was frustrated with myself at first, but more and more I became frustrated with the game developers for taking an interesting mechanic and using it in the wrong way.  They should have make the game about timing incoming waves of enemies and flipping back and forth between the screens to keep a chain multiplier going or something like that.  Instead, they turned the game into a puzzle game about positioning and grabbing collectables.  You know the old saying, "easy to learn and difficult to master?"  Well, this game is difficult to learn and difficult to master.  It asks too much of the player too quickly and focuses on the aspects of the game that are frustrating and instead of the ones that are fun.  I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone and would advise you to steer far clear of it.  

Final Status: Played (... and rage quit)

Final Score: 3/10 (miserable to play)