Twilight Parade: Moonlit Mononoke is a game about a special gathering for yokai. Unfortunately, the oni twins and their friends weren't invited, so they decide to crash the party and generally cause chaos. You play as the red and blue oni as well as a fox girl and bunny girl through five shoot-em-up stages based on Japanese culture. The enemies you fight are various yokai, and the bosses are awesome super sexy special yokai like a nekomata maid, a jorogumo spider woman, a nine tailed fox, and more.
Each of the four playable characters also has a separate swimsuit version, and they look pretty great. The bosses are also incredibly busty and jiggly and look fantastic as well. As far as fanservice goes, this game delivers.
Unfortunately, the shoot-em-up gameplay isn't so hot. It is ridiculously simple. This is one of those shmups where survival is the only objective. There's no innovative scoring system, or defensive systems, or flashy weapon upgrades, or anything particularly interesting. You just dodge bullets and survive while holding down the shoot button.The problem is that the levels are just incredibly boring, and while the bosses are more exciting, they aren't especially fun. The bosses take a million trillion bazillion hits to kill and aren't fun to fight at all. They're also boring because they just statically sit on the side of the screen and don't really do anything. There are no multiple phases or special attacks or anything unique. You just hold down the fire button for 5 straight minutes until the boss unexpectedly and suddenly dies since they don't have health bars.
The one sort of fun thing about the boss fights is that their bullet patterns usually aren't too insane, and there is always some spot you can just sit in and avoid getting hit. This isn't so much a game about dodging constantly, and is more about finding that sweet spot and then not moving. That's kinda sorta cool, maybe, for one run through the game but after that you've already figured out all of its tricks and it isn't fun anymore.
The other thing to know about the game is that there are no difficulty settings and lives don't matter. You can die over and over and just keep continuing. If you're especially lazy, you could literally just hold down the fire button and not move and get the achievements. Kind of makes you wonder why they bothered at all.
I will compliment the game on a couple of things, though. Your hit box, which is a small green jewel, is very clearly defined and easy to see. Likewise, the enemy bullets are all the same color and very, very easy to see. The bullets are white and pink, but only the tiny small white part can hurt you, so it's easy to see the clear paths through the bullet hell. I know these are seemingly simple things to praise, but way too many shmups get this simple stuff wrong.
Overall, Twilight Parade: Moonlit Mononoke is not particularly good. It is very cheap, though, and for $6 it's probably still worth a look. It'll take you a couple of hours to get all of the achievements - by beating it with all of the 8 characters - and that really ain't bad for $6. The girls do look pretty great, too, so I'd say check it out. It isn't good, but at least it's cheap.
Comments
Post a Comment