"Bullet hell.", begins the 1001 entry to DoDonPachi, assuming you know of the phrase already. The idea that a shoot 'em up can be so chaotic and manic that the best way to describe it would be 'like flying through bullet hell'.
The term, so I read, grew in popularity because 2D shooters had to do more and more in order to compete with the emerging 3D games that were getting all of the attention. How does a 2D shooter do more and more? If it's not highly detailed sprites and over-the-top effects, then it's highly detailed sprites and over-the-top effects applied to twenty enemies at once culminating in a monstrous boss battle that requires players to dodge hundreds, if not thousands of projectiles.
Bullet hell.
Let's find out how hellish DoDonPachi can get.
Fun Times
DoDonPachi is an arcade title whose PlayStation port I'm playing, complete with its infinite and free credits that I have a feeling I'll need in order to see the game through.
It starts off simply enough, asking you to pick from one of three ships, each with their attributes spread across two different weapon types, shot-based and laser-based. To me, they were the red ship, the green ship and the blue ship, and they all looked pretty good, but red is clearly the most dangerous colour, and so red I picked.
After dropping into the battle, things start slowly, for the first few seconds, before ramping up quite a bit.
Enemies are everywhere, and if you allow them to get a shot off - even one that will clearly miss - you'll have made your life more difficult, and that's not what you want in a bullet hell.
To not let them attack you, you pre-emptively attack them by assuming everything is ok to destroy and hold down the fire button to shoot your targets with the power of a thousand suns or something equally absurd. Your ship fires, two little helper ships fire, a quarter of the screen turns into bullet sprites... welcome to DoDonPachi.
Drop a bomb while shooting and either everything disappears in an explosion or your weapon overcharges to the power levels not seen in video games up until this point. It's a sight to behold for sure and will get you out of some hairy situations.
Dodging incoming fire is important in any shooter, but in a bullet hell it is a requirement, so it's a good job that your return fire is absolutely devastating, and looks remarkable. DoDonPachi is so well drawn that you've got to see it in motio-there I go again. I should just record video of these games.
After picking up points and powerups to get you more points and maybe after dropping bombs to turn everything on the screen into points that you can collect instead of not-points that will kill you, a stage will end with an appropriately large and dangerous boss fight.
Patterns ought to be learnt and weaknesses exploited, but if you've got no worries about running out of infinite continues, then death is but a slight bump in the road, and a chance to switch ships to something a little different.
Frustrations
These screenshots are a joy to look at, but they highlight the one thing that puts people off bullet hell shooters in the first place - how mental they are in terms of keeping track of what's going on.
Maybe it was because credits weren't an issue to me, but when all you have to do is hold down the fire button and wiggle the stick around, playing DoDonPachi turns into simply watching DoDonPachi.
Expert players will rightly argue that it takes skill to dodge all that you need to dodge, and more skill to get the high scores that everyone is ultimately aiming towards, but all I can think of when knowing that is that you're not really enjoying the spectacle at that point.
DoDonPachi looks amazing, but if I only get to see all the details because I've been shot out of the sky for the umpteenth time, what's the point of them?
I didn't count how many credits I used, and I know I didn't get the best ending or see all the stages because of those continues, but after however long it was - twenty minutes? - I was presented with this chap saying something in Japanese and that was that.
Final Word
Is DoDonPachi fun to play? Yes. Is it a must play? Let's go with yes as well. Is it in the top 1001 games you must play? Well, I don't know enough about the bullet hell sub-genre to know whether this is the best example of it or not, so that's a hard one to answer.
On the one hand, I'm seeing lovely graphics and gameplay full of arcadey sounds and music tracks to keep me going, and I thoroughly enjoy unleashing this amount of destruction upon anything and everything in my flight path.
On the other hand, I'm just holding down a button and moving a stick, and maybe pressing another button in desperate times, and the 'insert coin' button when required. I'm not exactly doing a lot of interacting with this piece of interactive entertainment.
Usually, I get the sense of whether I like a game by how often I want to take a screenshot and show everyone the game in question. I took a lot of screenshots for DoDonPachi. People should see this game. People should play this game. People are going to have fun with this game.
But, twenty minutes later, it's done.
Fun Facts
The game's title, as well as being a form on onomatopoeia to represent machinegun fire, translates to "Angry Leader Bee", and stages for the most skilled pilots will have you face giant robot bees.
DoDonPachi, developed by Cave, first released in 1997.
Version played: PlayStation, 1998, via emulation.
Version watched: Arcade, 1997 (World of Longplays)