https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO172nHc3DA

I 1-credit-cleared (“1cc’ed”) the game Espgaluda on August 8, 2025. Since Espgaluda was originally an arcade game that you put coins in to play, this means “putting in one coin and beating the whole game.” I started practicing for the clear on July 19, and played for hours a day almost every day since then. On paper it took me around 40 hours over 21 days. But it’s hard to say how many hours it took to build all the skills and the mindset that brought me to the clear. A lifetime, maybe?

“Clear” is a term arcade game players use that means “finishing” or “beating” a game. I like that term. It makes me think of things like getting clear of danger, or clearing out a messy room. Clearing your mind, getting clarity. Once you’re clear, you are done with something - and that leaves room for the next.

I can’t remember the first time I saw Espgaluda, but it must have made an impression on me because I kept returning to it over the years since my childhood. Long before I started playing shmups seriously in Sept 2024, I would often test out a new device’s Retroarch installation by booting up Espgaluda and playing the first few stages. The game has a style and vibe that I feel is still pretty unique among games.

Espgaluda combines 90s cutesy anime character designs with a kind of fantasy-steampunk aesthetic. There’s a surprising amount of violence and blood, probably a result of the game being the spiritual successor to the clearly Akira-inspired [ESP Ra.De](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_Ra.De.). The closest analogue I can think of is The Vision of Escaflowne.

The opening sequence sees your protector gunned down by soldiers in front of your character, after which she murders all the soldiers in a blast of psychic energy. They explode in a shower of blood, and throughout the game humanoid enemies are reduced to bloodstains when you shoot them. A recurring boss is your half-sister, who comes back after her first defeat with arms and legs cut off and replaced by mechanical parts. It leaves an impression on a kid.

Espgaluda was developed by CAVE, famous for defining the “bullet hell” genre in arcades with games like Dodonpachi. I’d known even back then that Espgaluda was meant to be their attempt at a “beginner-friendly” game.

Probably its most famous feature is that you can press a button to activate mode called “kakusei,”, which turns the bullets purple and makes them move much slower. Perfect for helping a beginner learn how to dodge. But this “beginner-friendly” feature was hiding a mean surprise - if you stay in slow motion too long, the bullets eventually turn red and start going faster than normal. Like the visual design, it is unexpectedly vicious.

Back then I could just about get through the first stage, but couldn’t finish stage 2 without losing all my lives. At some point, I watched a video of the game’s final boss and thought it was some kind of cruel joke. I shook my head whenever I remembered its undulating walls of bullets, at first passing over each other mesmerizingly, then dispersing into utter chaos.

For a game known as one of the easiest CAVE games to clear on a single credit, it is certainly still quite difficult. The word that I had for it: “impossible.”

I have long been fascinated by arcade games like Espgaluda and Metal Slug, because of their detailed pixel art and animations. Playing them was fun for a short while but I would always end my sessions slightly unsatisfied. They look so nice, but why are they so hard? Initially I felt like I wasn’t good enough at games. As I got better at other genres like RPGs, strategy, and racing games, that feeling turned into distaste. These games are not very well made, I thought. They were more like curiosities and novelties, museum pieces whose primary value was in their art and music than in their gameplay. They must be unfairly difficult because they didn’t understand how to make games back then. The goal must have been to attract people with the visuals and then try to make them spend money by killing them over and over.

Last year I started to appreciate and understand arcade games in general and shmups in particular. That's another story, but in short I had already gained some skill in the shmup genre by the time I thought about trying for the Espgaluda 1cc. Besides physical skill (how to dodge, how to read the screen and understand bullet patterns), a key skill in playing shmups is how to practice them. You can slowly build skill by just playing, but you will get better much faster if you can identify what you need to work on and find efficient ways to practice. Learning how to learn is an important skill, and I have had many opportunities to develop it over the years outside of playing video games.

Over several months I played lots of shmups and developed fundamental skills like dodging, pattern reading, awareness of positioning and your ship’s hitbox, routing, and resource management. Certain games went from seeming very hard to doable with some practice. Bullet patterns that initially felt undodgeable, like this one from Darius Gaiden (another game I love and the first shmup I ever 1cc’ed) became routine (footage credit).

In July, I felt I had developed enough as a player that I now had the potential to clear Espgaluda. A game that had long been a symbol of impossible difficulty was now potentially within reach. All it would take was applying the same method I had already successfully applied to other games.

Yet, years after that first exposure to Espgaluda, with many (dozens? hundreds?) hours of shmup experience and several 1ccs under my belt, as I struggled with it second by second and hour by hour and yet it refused to yield, the word “mean” kept coming to my mind.