Cave's new shooter - ESPgaluda movie!

Article on 1up.com

Holy crap. This game looks so beautiful and fun! After seeing ESPgaluda in motion, it's become one of the games I most want to play. Everything I've seen from it so far has completely blown away my expectations.

Cave rules, that's all there is to it. (^^)

 

The link is not working!
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Just fixed it - it should work now.

 

The graphic quality and the bullet patterns are outstanding.
The character design is unimpressive, though. ESPrade was one of the few character-based shmups whose design aesthetic i liked, mostly because of the originality. Moving to the cliched, wings - and - fantasy themes seems like a bad call, leave that crap to capcom.
Since it's cave, i'm sure the gameplay will be generally up to snuff, but from what I can tell it seems like they've moved closer to dodonpachi, with a rank system. ESPrade had a wonderfully intuitive way of rewarding aggression, without getting caught up in the trap of "must memorize exact time of next enemy appearance down to the microsecond in order to maintain meter". I'd hate to see that go, since ESPrade was challenging enough & fun to play for score without being a royal pain in the ass.
At any rate, it's a moot point. Since the game is about $1800 at release and chances of a home port are slim, I'm not going to play it for years, if at all.

 

Damn this looks serious.

 

I think the reason for the drastic style change was that Junya Ishida (art designer for a lot of Cave's past games) isn't involved. IIRC, he's busy with his manga, Otogi Matsuri (which is also really good).

Being very fond of ESPrade myself, I had my doubts about the shift in style at first, but it's started to grow on me. The enemy designs in particular really strike me though. Gods, they're beautiful.

I don't know where the rank system indicators you're getting are coming from though. It looks similar to the original ESPrade's bonus/bomb refill system with an extra counter for the amount of kakusei time you have. (I really like that whole idea - I can see many interesting strategic uses for it.)

This one had better get a home release. And soon.

 

I'd agree with you that the boss designs are much better than the main character designs. Still, more joker jun style psychic-teenagers-vs-giant-robots-and-screeching-dolls would have been preferable, for me at least.

As for the rank system, see shmupsforum. Someone scanned and (poorly) translated the famitsu article; if your japanese is better, check it out. From top to bottom, you've got lives, kakusei meter, gold counter, then barrier meter at the very bottom. The "gold counter" below the kakusei counter affects rank (in a scoring / multiplier sense, not in a Raizing "oh shit i picked up too many powerups" sense). It doesn't look like the gold counter decreases except on death or during boss fights, so maybe not as bad as DDP in terms of timing.

However, it looks like the gold counter / rank is disconnected from kakusei and barrier - those just refill through seperate powerups from killing enemies. The nice thing about ESPrade was that multiplier was connected to survival - the same things that helped you score also helped your barrier refill faster, thus helping you survive, in a nice feedback loop. Sorta the same general reason I like silvergun - there's a strategic advantage to playing for points, as opposed to being just an end in itself.

Anyway, blah blah, proof's in the pudding and I may have misunderstood it all. Check out the article & see what you think.

 

The shmupsforum thread now has a link to video of the final boss. Besides the nice homage to ESPrade, let's just say that the bullet patterns are beyond insane . . . and bombing only pisses the boss off. Good stuff.

 

I think I saw the prequel the other day. Doesn't look as fun as Psyvariar 2, which rocks the house.

 

After having played this game in Japan (and having seen Homestay Akira absolutely OWN it at Daioh - HOLY SHIT he's a shooter genius), I can honestly say ESPgaluda is not only my favorite Cave game, but my favorite vertical shooter.

It had damn well BETTER get ported to a home system, or I will cry. (;_

Here's some more killer gameplay movies!

http://www.cave.co.jp/arcade/espgaluda/movie.html

 

If it's half as addicting as Ikaruga, then it's gonna be great.