SHINORUBI Preview

I’ve always loved a good Danmaku style game! What is Danmaku? It’s a colourful, arcade style shoot ‘em up, that is essentially a bullet hell experience. Shinorubi promises to be one of these chaotic and hectic games whose end goal is to have you complete the game using only one credit. This sounds daunting, but Shinorubi offers a selection of difficulty levels including a Super Easy option. So it’s very accessible to anyone, no matter your skill level.

When starting the game you are greeted by a scantily clad woman who looks like she is an officer of some sort with knee-high boots, an eye patch, and hair that resembles tentacles. I’m not sure if she is a character you will unlock in the game or if she is just there for eye candy but either way she looks like she can kick some butt. The game suggests that you configure your game controller before you start playing. There are three buttons that you will primarily be using;

• 1st button- Auto Shoot Button
• 2nd button-Laser shot and
• 3rd button- Bomb

Use any buttons you find comfortable to use because when you are playing and having hundreds of shots coming towards you it will require a split-second reaction to avoid these.

Once you have controls set it’s time to select which character you will play as. At the beginning there are three different creatures to select from; some are animal-like and others are more alien-like, but they all have their own stats and unique attacks. Gammaray is a blue alien, Dark Kaen is a yellowish dinosaur, and Viproyer is a snake in a fancy purple outfit. This was an easy choice for me; clearly Viproyer was the one since he was wearing one of my favourite colours. There are five other characters available to be unlocked as you play so I can’t wait to check them all out once they are there to select.

Shinorubi features hi-def graphics and is a vibrant game with, not only colour-wise but soundtrack-wise. The music features electric guitars that really get your adrenaline pumping and keeps you awake. This game is high-energy all the way through and never lets up. Even playing on the Super Easy mode my screen was quickly filled with enemy ships and all the shots they were blasting at me. I had to make sure I was always moving and not sitting still if I had any hope of surviving. The game lets you know in advance that there are some enemies that you can’t destroy no matter how many shots you fire at them, so don’t bother wasting your time trying to destroy them. They are marked with a caution symbol so they are easy to spot.

Even though Shinorubi wants you to complete the game using the least amount of credits as possible, it still allows you to use up to 99 credits if you need. So you definitely don’t have to be worried about totally running out of continues. Unless you are really bad at games like these, then maybe you will be out of luck, at least you can set your own high-score that you can try to beat. Scoring points is based on recovering medals, stars, and hit accumulations. If you use concentrated shots to destroy enemies your FEVER bar will fill. Once it is charged, it is automatically engaged and increases your points by a huge amount by generating purple stars from the shots your enemies are firing at your ship. This cancels all the shots on the screen and based on the crazy amounts of shots that are flying around you can collect a ton of these purple stars that will add tons more points to your score.
During my playthrough I had to use a couple continues, but the game is nice enough to let you continue playing from exactly where you died. You don’t get sent back to the beginning of the level but you just continue blasting all the enemies in your path and make sure you take the one down that killed you last time. Total playthrough time was about an hour and a half, but that was on Super Easy. I’m sure if I challenged one of the higher difficulties that time would increase, guaranteed I would die a lot more than I did on this playthrough.

Shinorubi was a ton of fun and I really enjoyed playing it. Now that I’ve played the full game through, I will go back and challenge one of the other modes like Bossrush or Arranged that has the same stages but totally different rules like shoot the pink pigs or clear all the marked enemies from the screen. Or increase the difficulty and see if I can complete the increased chaos! There is a ton of replayability in Shinorubi that isn’t just trying to get the highest score that you can. No matter your skill level Shinorubi is very accessible to anyone, and even on Super Easy I wasn’t ever bored, it was still challenging but not in a way that felt unfair.