Flame Zapper Kotsujin

Flame Zapper Kotsujin is a Doujin shmup. There are just so many of those, likely because of how easy it is to make a shmup (not taking its quality into consideration, of course) and how popular the genre is and was in Japan, so it can be tough to find the good ones. The vast majority of Doujin shmups struggle to find any players at all, let alone reaching a wider audience. However, although it is impossible to play all these games, especially if you want to judge them well, I think I can confidently say that Kotsujin is one of the great Doujin shmups out there. It's the real deal, and I'll tell you why.

First let's look at when the game came out. 1996. It's definitely bullet hell and it predates Dodonpachi, which popularized the subgenre and came out in 1997. That's not saying Kotsujin is the first bullet hell. Batsugun, DonPachi, Garegga, and ChoRenSha 68k are arguably also part of the subgenre, but I think Kotsujin is a clearer example than those. So it goes without saying that Kotsujin was quite ahead of its time. What's even cooler is that it also feels distinctly like an oldschool shmup, even if it doesn't entirely play like one. The graphics are strongly influenced by Truxton, and the power up mechanic is like Raiden's. Kotsujin is both a progressive game and one that proudly takes influence from the greats that came before it. Now, how "bullet hell" the game really feels will depend on the difficulty setting. The game does have too many difficulty settings, but I settled on "Very Hard" as my favorite mode, although I mostly played "Normal" to do my scoring. "Mania", the hardest mode, is simply too hard, and was probably just a sick experiment. The enemies fire too many suicide bullets and have too much health, so I'm not sure it's possible to clear it. It's even harder than Futari Ultra, for instance.

The graphics are quite appealing. Some of the scrolling backgrounds may feel dated or awkward by now, but I think there's a charm to them. The art is quite detailed for a Doujin game. The design of your ship is simply iconic and awesome, and the enemies and bosses look really cool as well. The weapons are very satisfying. Although, in true Raiden fashion, the spread weapon is by far the best, it is entirely doable, and perhaps sometimes even preferable, to switch to one of the other two weapons (like the forward shot for one boss.) The weapon you have also dictates what kinda bomb you use, all three bombs are really fucking radical, which is great fun for casual players. Sadly, if you are scoring, you shouldn't be using the bombs (possible exception being the stage 5 asteroids.) You also get to choose between two different subweapons. Like in Raiden, during the game enemies will drop items that switch colors, and the color determines what item you get when you collect it.

The soundtrack is also legendary. In my opinion, it is not only one of the best Doujin shmup soundtracks, but one of the best videogame soundtracks, period. It's not a huge soundtrack, but it's worth noting that each song has two different versions (I don't know enough about PC-98 to know why this is the case, but some PC-98 games does this.) The composer, who is entirely unknown as far as I can tell, needs to be recognized for his work here. Both E.N.K.A and Ray Future as masterpieces. The sound design is an important part of Kotsujin, because while the gameplay is great, it's not quite as intricate, deep or engaging as good Touhou or CAVE game. Rather, what makes Kotsujin an appealing alternative to those is that it is just simple, fun, and has amazing tunes to drive it forward.

Still, although I personally love the game a lot for it's soundtrack and "feel", it would be a crime to write this review without going into the gameplay more. First of all, the stage design is good. It does feel rather NMK-ish at times, but there's also a Toaplan influence. For the most part, though, I think it's its own thing, and it's remarkable on its own that the enemy types change completely from stage to stage. The stages are varied with many different types of structural enemy purposes. The 4th stage is the only uninspired one; it's just rushed, simple and rather repetitive. However, the 5th and last is where the game peaks. The 5th stage is made up of two parts. The first part is a more generic space portion where you start out fighting large space cruisers and it gradually gets infested with asteroids for you to destroy. As more and more asteroids come in, finally it turns into a constant stream of enemies and bullets as well as big astroids (making it a pretty blatant bullet herding portion). Then you fight a midboss and the BGM changes... what's so cool is that the new BGM, E.N.K.A, is heard throughout both the entirety of the 2nd half of the stage and the final boss. So it kinda feels like the last stage itself is the final boss. In the 2nd half you enter a large base which feels quite Truxton-ish, with a far more remarkable and intense stage composition than you ever get in that game. Enemy composition itself feels more Daioh-ish. The bosses feels a bit more like old school bosses than bullet hell ones. Pretty simple patterns to avoid for the most part, but there's definitely some creativity here, such as how the 4th boss uses its spear, and most of the patterns the final boss uses. Also, considering this is 1996, your hitbox is really tiny.

The scoring system is a mixture of the old and simple, and a new take on Battle Garegga's medal chaining. You'll gain shields, like in Batsugun, which lets you take one hit for free. However, if you fill up the bar to get a new shield while you already have one, you get a bonus. Likewise, never getting hit during a stage gives you a higher clear bonus for that stage. So never getting hit at all pays off. You also get a higher clear bonus for never bombing during a stage, and only on the final stage is it worth (I think) to bomb regardless. Now, the medal chaining is more interesting, and arguably better than in Garegga. In this game, some enemies drop medals when killed, and each time you collect medals, the value goes up until it reaches a maximum... however, unlike in Garegga, you have to pay a lot of attention to when you kill the enemies and when you collect their medals, because the chaining works completely differently. In Garegga the value of the medals drops back to the minimum when you drop a medal, but there's no timer that drops the value; the time allocated in between medals to avoid a chain drop is infinite. In Kotsujin, you can drop medals without losing the chain, but when you reach the 2nd highest medal value (10k medals), an invisible enemy chaining timer is added (indicated by the yellow text). If you take more than 2 or 3 seconds to kill the next enemy, the value will drop back to the minimum, but as long as you keep killing enemies at a steady pace, they will keep dropping CO-2PRO medals, worth 31k. Only some enemies drops medals, though, so in order to score efficiently, you have to figure out when to miss the 10k medals until you're at a point where you can collect many CO2-PRO medals, because the stages do have lots of gaps where you're forced to drop the enemy chain timer. When you find these enemy chaining portions, it's a matter of treating it like a game of DonPachi and combo the medal-carrying enemies efficiently. Remember, these are bursts of chains rather than long chains (More like DonPachi than later entries in that series, in other words.) There is an extra stage which is more like a Caravan game that you can choose to play as well, which is a constant stream of medal-carrying enemies, and a really good way to get into how to do the chaining, as there are very few forced chain drops in this brief stage. The main game, by comparison, has fewer more spaced out medals, and is thus harder and takes more research to chain as much as possible. Overall, I feel that the medal system is a great mixture of item collection and enemy chaining. The game is probably pretty easily "solveable", though.

In short, the gameplay contains both old and new; traditional and progressive. In my book, Kotsujin may just be a masterpiece, but I admit the aesthetic and soundtrack is part of why I feel that way. The game is totally great, very fun, and very impressive, and although it doesn't quite have the depth of most Touhou or CAVE games, I do subjectively prefer it to many of those. All in all, a must play for shmup enthusiasts. A true hidden gem that I was lucky to discover early on.