Thunder Dragon 2

I've seen a lot of love for Thunder Dragon 2 in more recent years, and after 1ccing it I have to say that for the style it's going for, it's a great solid game. TD2 is simultaneously a bit of an eccentric oddity and a very simple, generic shmup. It's a vertical shmup that came out a few years before Bullet Hell was really a thing, with music and sound by Manabu Namiki. The game has 8 stages but only 2 stage themes, those themes are so damn good that it gives the game a hypnotic quality, yet at the same time, the lack of themes makes it more difficult to distinguish different stages. Manabu Namiki is also the announcer, and has some really memorable lines such as "EEHURR", "Hey, this is my present for you" and "It's time to put in more coins, man". It gives the game a fun B-Movie type feel.

The gameplay is as simple as it gets, but also has some terrible quirks, such as the item system which, like A Week of Garfield, expects you to memorize countless spots in the level to move to in order to spawn items. There is nothing indicating that you are supposed to go there, but each level has at least dozens of these random spots. Sometimes you're also meant to do other things, like destroy a specific group of enemies, or something... honestly, I have few of these requirements memorized and I might be getting something wrong here... anyways, Thunder Dragon 2 is interesting because it has these elements of Kusoge but at the same time at its core it's hard to deny that it's a quality oldschool shmup, you just have to accept the flaws and focus on what makes the game good if you wanna get into it. Another thing that annoyed me a lot when I first played the game many years ago was the bullet sprites. The bullets are tough on your eyes. When I picked it up for 1cc though, I easily got used to the bullets. Not sure what had changed.

The shooting and dodging is really simple. You're fighting mostly air enemies firing aimed bullets. The bosses fire some more Raiden-esque patterns and for the time period these bosses are pretty damn good. Bullet speed is slower than the Raiden-style, though. It's only a moderate speed. Enemy variety and game flow is good. The stages are fast paced and you're mostly expected to be streaming the enemy bullets, quick-killing enemies, and spawning and collecting score items. To score high, it's often a good idea to kill enemies quickly, as you can spawn bonus enemies that way. In parts of stages where the screen stops scrolling, you can perform some tedious enemy milks. Well, I'm not exactly an expert on the scoring, so I'm sure there's a lot I'm not aware of. The stage composition is quite good, prioritizing flow and simple functionality and intensity over complexity, depth, or unpredictability. There's two different player planes to choose from, each giving you a somewhat different gameplay style, and the difficulty is high enough to be a bit unapproachable for beginners, but low enough that almost anyone could learn to beat the game. It's one of those games that's entirely a matter of memorization; it doesn't take much skill compared to bullet hell shmups. It's also potentially very, very bomb-spammy, which is not something I enjoy, so I tried to limit my bomb usage for fun. All in all, a curious game which manages to be both stylish and generic. It's not the best shmup ever, but for fans of simple classic shmupping, it's definitely one that needs to be played. It's also the best shmup made by NMK in my opinion.