Like with any form of art, when it comes to video games the devil is in the details. Take the shoot ‘em up genre, for instance; one of the simplest concepts imaginable, and yet while every year there are at least 20 new titles to try out, very few manage to do things the right way. Shinorubi is one of those shmups that makes a killer first impression with its bombastic audio-visuals and frenetic pace, but the cracks start appearing steadily and quickly the longer one spends time with it. In short bursts, it looks and sounds like it might be something special: medals sparkle, power-ups burst vividly off the screen, fast rock tunes accompany the action, and the intro, menus and between-stage screens are stylishly put together. Sadly, Last Boss 88’s creation has plenty of flaws as well.
Moments into the first run and the first problem appears: everything looks as if it is made from grey plastics and fluorescent green metals, a pre-rendered look that makes it all blur together. Backgrounds are repetitive (with the second stage’s cloudy sky standing out as the lone memorable exception) and the existence of a widescreen aspect ratio doesn’t matter much if everything is stupefyingly large, making the view feel more cramped than the vertical shooters of old. Ugly? Yes, a bit. Most importantly, it makes it hard to understand what’s going on, as the palette is bright and bold, but almost aggressively so. This becomes actively uncomfortable to look at after a while.
Gameplay is standard shoot ‘em up fair. There’s the main spread shot, which basically showers a great deal of the screen with beams, and a secondary mode that takes all these beams and connects them in a single narrower one, slowing movement (very useful as this is a bullet hell experience), while also raising the ‘Fever’ meter, which in turn increases the accumulated score upon activation. Better score-chasing mechanics have seen the light of day, to be honest, so don’t expect to get hooked on trying to reach the top of the rankings. Generally, Shinorubi struggles greatly with standing out. It’s…okay, basically, and nothing more than that.
This is far from the most challenging of bullet hell shooters, yet even at the easiest difficulty setting plenty of lives will be lost. Firstly from the aforementioned issue of how garish the aesthetic is, but also because while the compact beam’s slowdown should allow precise weaving through dense bullet curtains, the majority of ships are a bit too fast and floaty. Deadly as well as irritating in a genre built on precision. Practice makes perfect, sure, but this gives little incentive to justify that investment. It is chock-full of different modes, like boss rushes, timed score chasers, and so on…but why bother?
Okay, let it be made clear: Shinorubi isn’t an awful game. It’s just that, even if one manages to stomach all the issues at hand, it never manages to be entertaining either. Maybe boss encounters are the best analogy. Giant mechanical terrors that spit endless streams of fire? Must be awesome, right?! Well, the fights themselves turn out to be oddly forgettable – in many ways these are just a bigger, more durable version of the lesser enemies. Heck, even the bullet patterns lack the finesse of the genre’s greats, as they follow little visual or mechanical logic. It all feels…random, to be frank.
Shinorubi needs a lot. It needs visuals that don’t make the whole deal an ordeal; it needs music that doesn’t feel as if it was algorithmically generated from a prompt of “fast J-rock shmup soundtrack / include endless generic guitar solos”; it needs more lore on the sexy front cover girl, who looks as if a Warhammer 40,000 Commissar and a dominatrix (with tentacle hair) had a baby; it needs levels (and bosses) with personality, so that everything doesn’t taste like a big, tasteless bowl of soup. More importantly, it needs more work on the actual shooting, the flying, and the shooting while flying business.
