Mushihimesama is a vertical Bullet Hell in where you play as a girl riding a giant beetle and shooting other giant bugs into oblivion. The reason why is explained at the end of the game but even then you will be left confused as to what happened and be left feeling like you just walked in to the ending of a movie with no context as to what it was about. Very few people go into a bullet hell expecting a engrossing story though I found it funny to be greeted with what was supposed to be a tear-jerking ending when the game didn’t even so much as tell me the main character’s name before that scene. It may sound weird to start off a review talking about the ending but this is a very short game and you will “beat it” in about half an hour or less, regardless of your skill level. This game features unlimited continues so everyone will be able to get through it if they are persistent enough. However the feature allowing you to save a replay of your play-through will cut off at the point you first lost all lives and had to use a continue.
There are three modes to play here, them being Novice, Normal and Arrange. Novice is exactly what it sounds like and makes the game considerably easier by having less projectiles and simpler bullet curtains compared to Normal mode. This is definitely the mode to start with if you are new or out of practice to the genre. Arrange is a remix of the game that tweaks with certain aspects of the game that I will cover more thoroughly in a bit. Each mode minus Arrange has both score attack in which you compete with your friends and “play”. While in either mode you will have the option of either picking “Original”, “Maniac” for higher scores as well as more challenge and finally “Ultra”, for when you want to throw your controller/keyboard across the room in utter frustration at the real last boss wiping the floor with you. You will also be able to change the amount of lives you have and at what score you get more. Finally you will be able to pick which one of the three bullet formations you want to have, S-Power for a stream of condensed bullets for heavy damage, W-Power for a screen filling low damage attack and M-Power that is a mix of both. There are quite a bit of options for you to mess around with to say the least.
Now that you are finally in the game and shooting bugs you will notice that this is pretty much what you would expect from a bullet hell. Bombs to clear the screen of projectiles, a counter to keep track of your score and a ton of enemies wanting nothing more than to shoot you out of the air. It does all of this very well and keeps you in a trance like state as you splatter all the bugs and collect all the yellow gems they drop to rake in a high score. Black enemy beetles carry power-ups so you will want to shoot these buggers down. The power-ups are either a small ally beetle that will shoot beams whenever you press the fire button, an upgrade to your projectiles or if you are about to fight a boss, a couple of bombs. A neat thing about the upgrade projectile power-up is that you can let its timer count down and it will change into a different type of shot. So say that you are shooting condensed projectiles but this part of the level is filled with a ton of enemies, simply wait for the power-up to change into a wide-shot formation and you will now have a much more suitable, screen filling projectile attack. This is a really neat system that makes it beneficial to learning the three projectile types instead of always sticking with what you know.
Enemies in this game are huge and their size does matter as they will fire larger projectiles the bigger they are. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be cautious of the smaller enemies as well, since they fire tiny projectiles it can be easy for them to shoot you when you are focusing on a gigantic enemy. Remember that you are flying, you will be able to pass over some ground enemies when the amount of projectiles get intense and it seems there is nowhere to go. Projectiles are bright purple and very easy to spot, so if you get hit it will always feel like your fault. All of the five stages have a mid-boss that you will have to face and will leave if you take too much time with them. Bosses are where you will be most tempted to use your bombs as they will shower you with intricate bullet patterns. These moments are when you will most likely experience slowdown that will bring the action down to a crawl. The developers have stated that these are on purpose to give you a chance to react to all that is happening on screen, though it would be nice to have an option to toggle the slow down on or off nonetheless.
That finally brings us to Arrange mode. This is only a mode you’d want to play if you are already familiar with the game, it only has the ultra difficulty meaning the game is at its most brutal and you will have to face the aforementioned real last boss. She is the most shump/bullet hell boss I have ever encountered by far. It is an extremely difficult fight and to top it off she has an absurd amount of health. It will takes longer to whittle down her health and defeat her than it does to play through most of the game. Now with that out of the way onto what makes Arrange mode different from the other two modes. For one you start the game fully powered up and are able to kill the earlier enemies much easier than usual. You will also have a feature most other games call “auto-bomb” which causes your character to automatically toss a bomb, clearing the screen when you are about to get hit. In this case she will throw all your bombs if you get hit, making your rate of survival much lower so you will not want to rely on that feature over your instinct of when to use them. The final thing that makes this mode much different is the ability to change your form of projectiles on the whim, to any of the three types available.
Music in this game is a calm and soothing strangely enough. Stranger still is that it somehow fits in with the whole shooting giant bugs theme of the game. That is mostly due to the nice environments that range from flying over the water, across deserts and through giant trees. You will also be able to mix and match the music to play stages with either of the two soundtracks available. If you are playing this game horizontally you will be able to pick from 12 backgrounds to cover the parts of the screen that goes unused. Vertically is how this game was meant to be played, so if you have a monitor that can pivot that would be the ideal way to play this, though you can’t go wrong either way. Annoyingly enough you will have to tweak the screen settings and the background in each of the three modes separately. One global setting would have been much preferred instead of having to tweak the game to our liking in all three modes. At the end of the day however, that is a minor complaint that will hopefully be fixed in a patch. This is a blast to play and due to its length won’t take up much of your time in your attempts to master the game. Mushihimesama is an excellent bullet hell with plenty of content to keep you coming back and is hopefully the first in many of developer Cave’s games to be released on the PC.
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