The Electric Underground's video: The Birth of Bullet Hell - DonPachi Review Legacy of CAVE

The Birth of Bullet Hell - DonPachi Review (Legacy of CAVE). When it comes to the origin of the Bullet Hell subgenre, the Toaplan game Batsugun is commonly cited as the beginning of the style of Shoot Em' Up officially. And while I think that Batsugun is a perfectly accurate resting point to declare the beginning of Bullet Hell, in this video I explain that the origin of Danmaku is a lot more of a fuzzy gradient than a clear turning point. Especially because I think there are two more games directly tied to the innovations that defined bullet hell that are directly before and after Batsugun, which are Grind Stormer (V-V) and Donpachi. And without these arcade games, we likely wouldn't have seen the larger Bullet Hell explosion of popularity that CAVE, Touhou, and Raizing ended up being at the forefront of. What I think is very important to understand about shmup design is that it is an iterative evolutionary history where a lot of the games, even from different developers (like Psikyo), are deeply related and directly communicating with each other in a much more immediate sense than we see in modern game design where Concord decides to try to cash in on the Overwatch craze, and misses the entire trend by years because of the extensive development time involved. This is not the case with shmups and many other arcade genres. They are more immediate both in terms of how they play and also how they are developed. Also I don't think the backstory about Tsuneki Ikeda and his time working at Toaplan and the birth of CAVE is that commonly known, which is really important to understand because it directly influenced the design and reception of Donpachi, which was a much more revolutionary game within the genre than I think it is commonly recognized for. Which is understandable, honestly, since it was released in-between two very significant events in arcade gaming history, the end of Toaplan and then the release of Dodonpachi. Poor Donpachi has been overlooked as a result and I'm plenty guilty of overlooking this game myself, because of how hard it is to not look at it as merely the prelude to to my favorite game of all time. Shout out to Shmuplations for their fantastic translations of CAVE interviews, they are going to be an invaluable resource for the Legacy of CAVE series, I can tell. https://shmuplations.com/ Awesome thumbnail created by @boghogSTG Cool intro animation: @verygoodfreelancer Patreon https://www.patreon.com/electricunderground [$2 tier = Monthly Game Review Vote, Name in Credits, Exclusive Monthly Podcast] [$5 tier = Double Monthly Game Review Vote, By Name Shout-out, Name in Credits, Exclusive Monthly Podcast] Website: https://theelectricundergr.wixsite.com/the-electric-undergr Electric Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricUnderground/ STG Revision 2020 Discord (Shhmup Community Discord): https://discord.gg/snRueeH , ,