Follow_Freeman's Tyrian review

Your opening sentence about the side-scrolling shoot-em-up is a bit confusing, since the game you're reviewing is a vertical shooter. The next sentence also needs to be cleaned up, because it got too complex for its own good and that led to some grammatical issues. Otherwise, though, the writing throughout was quite solid on a technical level. Your tagline promises the game is the greatest shooter ever made, and while your review didn't convince me of that (a lot of the best shooters are made excellent by the very things your text ridicules), you did make me head to GOG to ensure I had the free game in my library. I apparently already did. Or at any rate, I do now. I like vertical shooters, so I might someday even play it! In any event, it's clear you like the game a lot, and your review outlines the reasons for that without becoming dull in the process, so I consider it a success.

Thanks for the feedback! I fixed the incorrect jargon to avoid any further confusion. I would be interested in knowing what you thought were positive points of the genre that I spoke poorly of, since I'm a bit worried that the review is a lot less objective than it aims to be. I do feel passionately about the subject matter and the decline of a genre I'd like to see held to a higher standard, so I hope that showed in the writing, at least. And I'm sure you'll enjoy the game, even (if not especially) when played in bite-sized bursts!

The tone throughout your review suggests you believe the genre in general is designed almost solely to gobble coins while punishing players for enduring the design. A lot of people who play through shooters love working their way toward mastery over those elements. They don't necessarily consider bullet hell difficulty to be hateful, as you do.

But your goal with a review, especially one that claims a game is the best of its genre, shouldn't be objectivity. A lot of what any review contains, unless it is literally describing features in completely neutral language (and maybe even then), is subjective. So that's something to be mindful of any time you're attempting to be objective within a particular mode of writing (such as a review) that is inherently subjective.

I can't really see how getting killed in one hit is a widely applicable feature of any game, much less one in which taking damage is all but inevitable, but I suppose that's where we agree to disagree. I think I covered my bases on the difficulty side of things by detailing the difficulty modes and how they dynamically alter gameplay, so I guess that covers everything. Again, thanks for the feedback!

I have been thinking of this game genre quite some time, lately — and I have been moderately playing some of its best games. I am also saddened by the genre being close to extinction, especially when you don't count low-production level indie shooters.

Steam achievements statistics for Ikaruga, which is an average-difficulty shooter in the context of the last ≈ 20 years of the genre, say 0.9% of players have completed the game without using any continues "in any mode". We can safely assume at least half of them beat the game on Easy. Since having actually learned/enjoyed a game means more or less to have beaten it, and to have actually beaten it means to have completed it without continues on Normal, this means ≈ 0.45% who got Ikaruga on Steam (we can reasonably assume it's at least slightly more-than-average skilled folks) could learn and seriously enjoy it.

Ikaruga is a sort of moderate entry to the bullet-hell genre. If it was a Raizing, or Cave, shooter, that 0.45% would be divided by at least 5, and you'd have, at most, 1‰ of players who could seriously enjoy the game.
And, in the last 20 years, "bullet hell" and "shooter" have become synonyms.

So, while I agree with most remarks by honestgamer, and disagree with a couple of criticisms of the genre in the review, I also can't understand while all the best developers, at some point in time, decided to make things impossible for 999/1000 players, or, in the more moderate cases (such as with Ikaruga), 199/200 players, in all the games in their portfolios.

Had the purpose been coin-gobbling, the difficulty would have been lowered substantially in console/computer ports; it's more of an unreserved adhesion to idealistic principles of game design, which spiralled, got out of control, and led to the genre's demise. You can't confuse the world of Twitch streamers, YouTube let's players, with the real world of even serious, patient, commitment-willing videogame players.

This said, enemy and bullet patterns in games such as Ibara or Mushihimesama belong in the art dimension, and they aren't there to conceal the game's lack of content or design laziness. Pity that, from the sixth console generation on, they didn't think of making, besides some works of videogame art, games that, though challenging, would be playable.