Preliminary: (see my status update from 11 months ago) Welp, here I am, finally at 1987. 1942 became my basis to other vertical scrollers and shmups that came after it. By no means was it an absolute favorite, but it truly hooked me and I played it to the end and it's one of those games I felt made me a better gamer. Plus, it solidified shmups as a go-to genre. Anyway, based on my earlier arcade playtest and now this playtest, I can definitely say the Sound is great, the Look of the backgrounds has that nice feel like the 1942 backgrounds did, and the frequency of power-ups is delightful. Here I go again, my thumb will surely be sore from mashing the shoot button and basically just surviving, enjoying the power-ups I hope, jamming to the music, and repeatedly questioning whether I should stop but staying hooked anyway. Hopefully this one has a set ending too like 1942! Tho that one sure was long!! (oh nice just read there are only 16 stages?! the original had 32... hm)

Look: 8/10 Great between-round success graphic when Mission Completed. Not as great variety or quality of backdrops tho as in 1942. Great ending graphic too. (well, the look of it. not the US patriotism :-p )

Sound: 7/10 (would be an 8 without that beep) Great jams... annoying beep for when you're low on fuel/energy though...

Play: 6/10 Meh, well I got to what I assume is my first boss? And it's more like a mission where you have to do enough damage/destruction in a segment. And it seems your fuel/energy level depletes with each shot? So it kinda ruins my usual strategy of merely surviving till the next boss then being strategic against the boss heh. I hope in later levels it has actual bosses like in 1942... good thing it's only 16 levels this time. Not vibing with it as much. Perhaps also because there isn't the novelty of the first one (thank goodness for the great jam tho!)... Glad to see you can still to the roll thing when you press both buttons. Oh and glad you can shoot away the enemy projectiles (... it seems)

The 2nd play session only reaffirmed my feelings: this game would have been better simpler. Just focus on the power-ups and chaos. I couldn't just focus on my 1942 technique of spamming attack and dodging projectiles and enemies, because there was the Power/Energy factor. It depletes no matter what over time. Never a fan of that in games. You can collect the POW's for energy back, but that's an addition to the game that didn't add fun imo. And almost comes across as a coin eating mechanism. Never was a fan of Fuel in flying shmups, nor time limits, and so on. That was a serious damper on the game.

Feel: 7/10 Good thing it has a very forgiving Continue function heh. I was unsure whether to finish as I entered Round 3, but it went really quick. And that had what felt like an actual boss at the end... still.. didn't feel quite the same. And I wish the power-ups lasted longer. I do wonder what it's like with 2-player.

Attachment: 6/10 Well, I'm done with Round 4. I'm thinking I will call it quits, butttt might as well give it another try tomorrow. By no means is it bad but I'm not hooked. We'll see tho ha, I kept debating stopping with 1942 but pushed to the end. And this one's half the number of missions after all!

On my second play session I was very meh about Round 5, but Round 6 was fun and had lots of Auto machine gun power-ups as well as having side-ships which was fun. I suppose I will push through for now.

I almost quit the game again on Round 11. This was different from how I pushed through with 1942 though... not really sure why I did it this time. By Round 14, instead of the fun "fine I'll just spam attack and dodge everything" technique, I was using the "fine I have infinite coins anyway so let's use the special moves that consume Fuel/Energy" technique. Which is not only much less fun, but also unveils the coin eating mechanism built into this game. So much potential here. Like with Super Qix we should have seen fun new power-ups, not just a new Fuel mechanism. Not my type of new tech addition... Welp, at last I'm at Round 16, I realized maybe I didn't have to always get a Mission Completed screen (which was one of the better Looks of the game) in order to move on to the next round? Annnd at last, this absurd-for-a-Japanese-game ending screen

I don't think I will be returning to this one. If I have the drive for something like this, I'll do 1942 or another shmup. I feel weird having played entirely through a game and still winding up giving it a 2... maybe if I gave the Sound an 8 or the Play a 7... but I just really don't like that Fuel function and otherwise it's essentially the same (albeit a bit smoother and faster-playing) as 1942.. Argh, so it goes. (Maybe if I get the chance to do a 2-player playthrough and I enjoy it more... or if I return to the arcade, I had a lot of fun with it during my initial playtest after al..)

Completion: All 16 unique Rounds, Highest score was 213, 800 but at the end I purposefully died a lot since I had infinite coins and would just use special attacks lol because the game is broken/poorly-made with that feature Playtime: 50 mins