Post subject: Review: Blue Wish Resurrection
Joined: 6/4/2006
Posts: 97
Location: Everywhere including nowhere
As some of you may know, I'm quite the glutton for punishment when it comes to games, especially my beloved shmups. For some reason many human beings, myself included, find it enjoyable to get our arses handed to us by a technicolor bullet buffet, and practically line up for the experience. It's a bizarre phenomenon, and one that many game developers love to cultivate. One example is the fairly recent Blue Wish Resurrection, a freeware remake of the original Blue Wish. The first thing any hardcore bullet hell enthusiast will notice playing it is that it is a carbon copy of DoDonPachi, with stars replaced by weird Rubik's cube things. However, it is in fact infinitely better than DDP, because of one crucial addition: one ill-begotten gameplay element in DDP was the focus firing, which started after you held the fire button for a few seconds. The problem is that focus firing slows you down and is less effective at mowing down a ludicrous quantity of enemies than your normal fire, so to actually mow down a ludicrous quantity of enemies you had to mash the fire button until your arms fell off. Blue Wish averts this problem with the inclusion of a separate fire button for using your main, mow-down-y gun, which is so very helpful. Another problem that DDP had was that the enemy bullets were all the exact same shade of hot electric pink (with the occasional hot electric purple thrown in for variety), which not only strained the eyes after a while, it also was just plain obnoxious to look at. Blue Wish actually lets you change the color of the bullets, which is handy if you want to choose a less offensive color, although it'd be nice if someone other than ZUN could come up with bullet swarms that aren't all the same color. Blue Wish also inherits its spiritual predecessor's legendary difficulty, and the option that automatically protects you against bullets at the cost of a bomb doesn't help in the slightest. This is one of the few games where you can die at the first level's boss and be praised for it, not because you did your best, but because you did better than everybody else. The bullets move inhumanly quickly, the supercharged attacks you get when your press fire and bomb at the same time are next to worthless, and the bullet hail never lets up, ever. And did I mention they moved inhumanly quickly? As for the other aspects of gameplay, there's nothing too agregious to point out. The backgrounds are rather dull and depressing, which is sad given the vibrant, lively graphics DoDonPachi had. . The music is tolerable, if not high-quality, but I'm going mostly on memory here since wine stopped being able to play the music in this game a while ago. Overall, I give Blue Wish Resurrection a 8 out of 10... if you're a fan of bullet hell shmups, that is. For the normal people, I give it a -2 out of 10, with the following advice: stay away.
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Senior Moderator
Joined: 8/4/2005
Posts: 5769
Location: Away
First of all, glad to see this doujin game gain some attention. Now on to the review itself. Unfortunately, comparing this game directly to DoDonPachi is a huge fallacy. For several reasons. 1. Scoring system is drastically different. In DDP, you chain enemies and no-miss/no-bomb for as long as possible. In BWR, the scoring system is close to that of Ketsui (pointblanking enemies for higher ingot values) with a little dash of bullet canceling (which is the prevalent tactic of Espgaluda and Mushihimesama). About half the score comes from calculating end-of-stage/end-of-game bonuses which depend on the number of ingots you've collected and spare lives/bombs. 2. Patterns, as funny as it may sound, are different. BWR's are much, much closer to those of Espgaluda rather than more simplistic attacks of DDP. Emphasis is put on complex bullet behavior rather than prevalent direct attacks and spam. You can see Ketsui for even more complex patterns. What does it mean in general? DDP's simplistic patterns are easy to read but hard to dodge. A total opposite of this are games like Ketsui (or Touhou games you are more familiar with), where many patterns are way harder to read, but they take less skill in general to dodge after you've understood them. 3. Difficulty. This is simple: clearing BWR Original mode on one credit is easier than reaching stage 6 in DDP. I know it from my own experience, and I've only spent a shred of time I spent on DDP on BWR. DDP doesn't have autobomb feature, either, not homing shot-enabled ships. These are the key aspects that you've missed due to inexperience. I suggest playing more different games by different developers, or at least more games by Cave themselves. For the record, my current scores for BWR: Heaven: ALL — 33,019,830 (Eden, autobomb on); Original: ALL — 24,662,070 (Peace, autobomb on). I haven't put much time into Hell and Accel modes, but so far I've managed to reach stage 3 in either.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.