https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gay_U7lw-F4

Fall is when grade schools and universities start their academic years. Fall is when I began my education in arcade games in general, and shmups in particular. I have no memory of the specific moment two years ago that I made the decision to start playing Darius Gaiden, not to feed credits and marvel at the sprite work and animations as I’d done many times over the years, but with the determination to clear it without continues. It might have been a cold gray morning like today, one of the first breaks in the seemingly endless hot summer days, a reminder that no circumstances last forever. I have no way of knowing for sure, two years later. In the course of your education, you forget as many things as you learn.

Clearing Espgaluda was my first major test. It was the first that fought back hard, refused to give in, beat me down, and forced me to confront my limitations - not as a player, but as a person. It’s tempting to say that it pushed me beyond my limits, or beyond what I thought was possible. In truth, by then I’d already forgotten that I used to think clearing a game like that was impossible. At some point, that supposed truth which I’d carried with me all through childhood and into my adult years, which seemed as indisputable as gravity, had disappeared from my mind. The more my skill grew, the more my expectations grew with it. I learned that the sweet self-belief that comes with skill and achievement can grow sour in your heart, turning into entitlement and arrogance. Instead of courage, the lesson I needed to learn from Espgaluda was humility. You are not entitled to success, even if you believe you deserve it.

Clearing Dodonpachi DaiOuJou was like doing research, running experiments. The question: How hard are these games, really, and do I really want to spend a significant part of my life playing them? Freed from entitlement and expectation, I wanted to know how much I really cared about these games. The cold and uncaring canvas of DOJ was the backdrop for these explorations. Maybe a part of me wanted that coldness, to be forced to go where the game was, rather than having it meet me halfway. In making that journey I realized what I wanted: I wanted to play. In the harsh, uninviting DOJ I found a friend that I think will be lifelong, and learned that yes, inside me does stir that “passion against reason.”

Clearing Ketsui was like completing a thesis or capstone project. As one of the hardest CAVE 1-alls, clearing it would prove I was learning the right things, progressing on the right track. Like a long project, life got in the way while working on it. Other people got in the way while working on it. When something is important, that doesn’t stop you. And as often happens, when you make it to the other side, having accomplished something that you look back on with awe, that simultaneously took you an eternity and what seems like no time at all, you realize that the main thing you learned is that there is much more to learn.

Clearing SaiDaiOuJou was like that last push to meet all the credit requirements and check all the boxes before you can rightfully accept your diploma. Having cleared all of the other Dodonpachi games, I felt I had an obligation to clear the last and most difficult. It was both the hardest single-loop game I’ve cleared so far, and also one that I could almost take clearing for granted. By this point, I knew I had the skills and knowledge to clear - it was just a question of time and effort. But like in school, just knowing you are ready doesn’t mean you get the credit (pun intended). I still had to work, and that work was still non-trivial. But when the last pixel of the final boss’s health bar disappeared, and I entered my initials on the high score table, it wasn’t triumph or disbelief I felt, like I had when I cleared Espgaluda. It was the same feeling I felt when I finished the last course of my Masters program. I had made it out. Now what?

SaiDaiOuJou is straightforwardly brutal game designed to kill even experienced players, dressed in the jarring garb of mainstream 2010s anime. Gone are the muted colors and strikingly simple images of the past - a giant gray laser cannon that dwarfs your tiny plane, towers firing sprays of bullets above distant clouds, a raging demon bee robed in fire. In their place are eye-searingly bright yellows, blues, purples, and pinks. The protagonists are anime girls wearing short skirts and lingerie, who look like they were plucked out of a low-budget harem anime. The sensory assault doesn’t stop at the visuals - these girls will not stop jabbering as you play, constantly calling out your bomb usage, hyper meter status, and boss phase changes. The true final boss (who is supposed to be the same raging demon bee from DaiOuJou, but now as an anime girl) talks so much while you fight her that people make jokes about it. I would not not have played any other game that looked and sounded like this, were it not for the pedigree of the developers and what it represented for the company they worked for. SaiDaiOuJou was their last push, the last gasp of the dying (or perhaps already dead) arcade genre. The part of it that remained after the death of the arcades was not the game design lessons the developers had learned throughout their own education in the arcade world. It was the anime waifus, and the knowledge that waifus achieve their fullest economic potential not in the genre of arcade games, but free-to-play gacha.

Although arcades were on life support at the time SaiDaiOuJou’s development, however, they were alive enough that the game design lessons learned by CAVE’s developers over 17 years and around 20 games were given one last opportunity to shine. This would be the last Dodonpachi game, and the last CAVE game made for arcades before their pivot to mobile. From a game design perspective, it passes with flying colors (when you consider the color scheme, quite literally). Enemy patterns and behaviors are simple in concept yet brutally effective at cornering and killing the player, and the stages layer them together in ways that are initially incomprehensible and confounding, yet reveal unexpectedly elegant and varied solutions. Aimed bullets fly toward you at strange and inconsistent angles, sometimes slightly ahead or behind, making what should be simple streams and redirects dangerous. The A-type ship I used feels both slightly too fast for micrododging and slightly too slow for macro, requiring close attention and careful movement at all times. Slipping between gaps or getting around the game’s signature bullet sprays (which widen and track you at the last second in anticipation of your attempts to macrododge them) still feels viscerally dangerous to me in a way unlike other CAVE games I’ve cleared.

SDOJ game design tied to a compromise, for business reasons.

The way I defeated the final boss felt like I was repeating lessons learned long ago. The first Dodonpachi game is often sold to beginners as a “good introduction to shmups”, on the premise that you can “just bomb whenever you get scared”. While this is clearly coming from veterans who have forgotten just how much they had to learn before getting their first clears, there is a kernel of truth to it. If you play just well enough to reach the final boss with one or two extra lives, you will have enough bombs to simply press the bomb button over and over until it dies. This was how I achieved my first clear of DDP, and also how I cleared SDOJ.

When writing about DOJ, I mentioned the Japanese difficulty list that put its 2-loop clear at the top. At the time, I thought that was the absolute pinnacle of shmup difficulty. It turns out that the SDOJ offers a challenge even greater - so great, that at this time only two people have ever done it. The first clear of SDOJ with the true last boss (TLB) Inbachi, which requires not dying or bombing a single time to reach, was first done 12 years after its release. The second was 2 weeks before the time of this writing. It is a task so absurdly difficult that apparently it doesn’t even have a place on a difficulty list. As of now, only two people have ever fully completed SDOJ. It seems fitting that the final entry in a famously difficult series, in a famously “inaccessible” genre, would be so difficult that only two out of legions of past and current superplayers have done it after 14 years, especially considering that DDP and DOJ were TLB-cleared within months of release. If you believe that difficulty is content, there is enough content in SDOJ to last any player decades, if not their whole life.

SDOJ could be thought of as the true final test of shmups, a test so stringent that for any given player, even some of the best in the world, you could confidently predict that they will never pass it in their lifetime. Even its most basic, non-TLB form is considered one of the hardest single-loop CAVE 1ccs.

SDOJ. Final test. How do games fit into life, when life is hard? How important are they, really?

Writing and games. Creativity as passing stool or vomiting, or giving birth. The two activities are diametrically opposed in practice, but very similar in spirit.

SDOJ as CAVE’s last game. Best and worst of CAVE. Some things are forgotten, some things are kept. CAVE said goodbye to arcade games after SDOJ. They graduated to the realities of the video game business. Their return this year brought back some good, some bad. We each have to decide what we want.

Continued education. Other arcade genres. 2-ALLs. My Touhou Lunatic clear, and LNNs.

The neighbor’s cat who was there 1 year ago to see me pass my first test has died. The first cat of my own, who both stymied and contributed to passing the last test of this chapter of my education, is just starting her life. My wife, who has been there through it all, is walking besides me on the long, long road, which will take us through the best and the worst. May the worst be left behind, gratefully forgotten, and the best stay with us always.