Flying Shark

Hishouzame, also known as Flying Shark, is as classic as classic Toaplan gets, it was a huge influence on future vertical shooters, including the beloved Raiden series. It set the benchmark for future Toaplan titles, and got heaps of forgettable imitators. You can see that the core idea of what makes a good designed classic vertical shooter is all here. The problem that arises is whether this kind of game is really enough? I didn't put a whole lot of time into it but quickly ran into a situation common for these games: long credits consisting of repeating loops. See, this was really common for shooters back then, that they would loop infinitely. Over time, devs would more often reduce the loops to a finite number and finally more and more of them gained the sense to not loop the game at all.

It's as simple as it gets. You control a slow moving plane and shoot down meticulously placed enemy tanks, boats, planes and turrets, all of which shoot relatively fast aimed bullets. As such the gameplay consists of shooting down enemies and streaming their bullets. Powering up your shot is essential and the main difficulty is recovering after you die since your shot is too weak afterwards to kill stuff in the loops, which means you'll have to carefully plan your bombs. The game doesn't exactly have bosses, but that's down to interpretation, as there are a couple of particularly large foes. Hishouzame does have a mechanic that becomes more important as you engage with the game more, where you can blow off the top of tanks and boats, which means the enemies aren't "dead" per se. They'll still absorb your shots until fully destroyed, but they can't actually shoot you any more.

Although it's a great game for its time, my issue with it is the aforementioned looping and simplicity. There isn't really a scoring system besides just playing as far as possible. Once you've memorized playing the game on max power, you can theoretically loop it infinitely, as the difficulty isn't that high and it stops rising after the 3rd loop, that's when the "deadzones" between you and ground targets are completely removed, and enemy bullets and shot frequency reach their max speed. Personally, I've made it to the 8th loop. Learning the recoveries isn't that bad, either, it's mainly just hard on the 5th stage. As far as Toaplan's shooters go, I'd say this is one of the better ones and possibly the most influential as well. The style may seem generic, but the catchy triumphant music so common in Toaplan's games serves as a good motivator to go on. Also, it is a pretty damn fun game, it just doesn't have enough longevity to get a higher rating from me. It's quite similar to Kyukyoku Tiger / Twin Cobra, and Same! Same! Same! / Fire Shark, though the Japanese versions of those games are tougher than Hishouzame, they're not necessarily tougher in a good way. I believe all of these games have significantly easier Western versions (especially Fire Shark)

A solid classic game that I would recommend to have a look at, but don't expect to be blown away by it. It's a good game to play to ease yourself into this style of STG.