Picked up Raiden V: DX for a pretty good sale price at $13, gave it a spin just to see how it would run on my new PC. Lightning fast, you might say, although I've never played nor imagined a game so dedicated to the furiously denounced flaws of the widely derided Sine Mora. Can you say BLOOM LIGHTING EFFECTS? And while Sine Mora was able to light the shmup world on fire with just optional screen shake and two bullet colors (orange and blue), Sine Mora 2: Raiden V has individual enemy volleys that can mix as many as five colors (red, blue, green, yellow, pink!), not to mention any other enemies on screen and the player's two hues of their own (blue and your choice of red, blue, or purple). It even has a camera that will zoom in and out mid-combat! Boy there's nothing I love more than watching the playing area shrink to half scale (and double size) while an approaching bullet pattern become so small and orange that it's completely obscured by the sun glare blooming off the orange buildings in the orange desert and the whole game becomes a gleaming white blob.
Seriously it's a nightmare. It's also baffling that anyone called this game "burdensomely latched to hoary conventions of shmups yore", when it's in fact so modern that it barely feels like a Raiden game at all (unless this is what the Fighters subseries is like). It has a long-form story mode with incessant voiceover during gameplay (you may say - hey, isn't that a Star Fox thing? but only Sine Mora and Raiden V are smart enough to pair it with subtitles covering part of the gameplay area), save points, branching paths, three ships with different stats and fully customizable weapons loadouts (three choices each for red, blue, and purple, for a total of 81 different profiles!), achievements, and a goofy-ass networked parallel-play power-up system. Like, Raiden III and IV are 90% the same game, IV is a loose remake of II, and the original Raiden has like eight variations and ports. This is a series about on par with Mega Man for variation, so continuing from IV to V feels like going from Mega Man 4 straight to ZX Advent without the 15 years of connective tissue explaining how you got there.
Did I mention the lifebar!!!
Okay I just hit up YT and WP and yeah looks like most of the new weapons and the branching paths are just carryover from Fighters. Why not now, nearly 20 years after the final entry?
I started hating Raiden V when I tried playing it in co-op with guests on my brand-new Xbox One and I couldn't.
ReplyDeleteBecause, you know, this first iteration of V has no co-op. NO CO-OP in a Raiden game!
yea right