https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-IBbLWlj7M

Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi is considered one of the hardest bullet hell games created by arcade shmup developer CAVE. Bullet hell itself is a genre often considered inaccessibly difficult. I have seen many people post comments about how these games are too difficult, and how they are innately unable to play them. One year ago, I spent my holiday break picking through beginner shmups on the Nintendo Switch - games like Hazelnut Hex, Neko Navy, and Crimzon Clover Novice mode - trying and failing to get through most of their stages, let alone clear them. At that time, clearing a game like Ketsui with a single credit seemed so ludicrous it didn't even cross my mind. In truth I didn't set any lofty goals for myself at the time, because they seemed so far out of reach. I thought that there was a non-zero possibility that I'd never be able to clear a really hard game.

That might sound defeatist, but this mindset enabled me to approach shmups with curiosity instead of pressure or expectation. How hard are they, and what exactly makes them hard? I played easy game after easy game, died countless times, and eventually started clearing some of them. When I created a YouTube channel to post videos of my clears, I set my channel icon to an image of the exploding player ship from Darius Gaiden (the first shmup I ever 1-credit-cleared). Failure is a huge part of these games no matter your skill level, and I wanted to keep approaching them with humility and a sense of humor.

I spent a few years of my life indoor rock climbing and bouldering multiple times a week. When I first started, only the easiest V0 bouldering routes were accessible to me. These represented probably less than 10% of the total routes available in a given gym. As I improved and was eventually able to climb V3/V4 consistently and do the occasional V5, the initially intimidating and inaccessible walls of the gym opened up to me and became like a second home. Even so, more than half the routes were still too hard for me. When I first started playing shmups, I heard the game critic Mark MSX say that “difficulty is content”, and remembered my time in the climbing gyms. The difficulty is the point of the experience, not a barrier to it. Remove the difficulty and you have removed the activity. The fact I couldn’t climb V10 was my problem, not the sport’s. All those difficult games were art waiting to be discovered, provided I was ready for them.

By the time I was ready for my first real test in shmups, CAVE’s Espgaluda (considered one of the easiest CAVE games), I was able to weather the self-doubt and self-imposed pressure that unexpectedly appeared, and rise to that game's challenge. A few months after that, I was able to rise to Ketsui's challenge as one of CAVE's hardest games, and overcome it as well. In one year I've learned a lot of lessons about the nature of difficulty and “impossibility”.

The plot of Ketsui tells the story of a suicide mission conducted against global arms dealer EVAC Industries (CAVE in reverse), which has been perpetuating warfare around the world in order to profit from weapons sales. In 2025, this premise is sounding less and less unlikely by the day. The UN hatches a plan to send pilots to strike EVAC’s headquarters - they will fly prototype EVAC jets, under the pretense that EVAC’s own forces are rebelling against it. In the event they succeed in destroying EVAC, the pilots will be killed to prevent the plan from being traced back to the UN.

The main title ケツイ (Ketsui) is straightforwardly translatable to “Determination”. The subtitle 絆地獄たち (Kizuna Jigoku Tachi) is often translated as “Cutting the Bonds of Hell”. This makes it sound like someone (presumably the protagonists) are bound to Hell, and cut their bonds to it through their actions in the game. I’ve always been a little dissatisfied with this translation, because while the kanji in 絆地獄 literally translates to “bonds” and “hell”, “kizuna jigoku” seems to be something invented by the game developers, rather than a standard grammatical phrase or existing term. I haven’t found any other usage of it besides in this game.

To my basic Japanese, I think “jigoku no kizuna” would be a better fit for “bonds of hell”, if that’s what CAVE was going for. “Kizuna jigoku” sounds to me more like the bonds themselves are hell - a hell created by bonds, not bonds belonging to hell. To me this is more evocative of the prison the protagonists have found themselves in - bound to an impossible mission and doomed to death and ignominy even in success.

It’s fitting that some of the hardest bullet hell games like Ketsui and Dodonpachi DaiOuJou feature such fatalistic and depressing plots. The games themselves are brutal, so why not frame the worlds they exist in the same way - hellish prisons from which the protagonists have no escape from death?

I’ve written about the progression in my approach to these games, from my uncertain, naive wandering with Espgaluda to my befriending of the initially cold and impenetrable DaiOuJou. In comparison, my journey to clear Ketsui was a much more straightforward one. I knew exactly what I had to do: plan, practice (and practice some more), execute, and not give up. Ketsui is a brutally simple game with very few mechanics compared to the other two. The main mechanical wrinkle it offers is a straightforward lock-on system, which allows locking on to the closest target in front of you and directing fire toward it as long as you keep holding down the button. Besides that, you just have your normal rapid shot and bombs. This mechanical simplicity is made up for by the sheer number and speed of enemies and bullets, which can make Espgaluda and DOJ look comparatively sparse and leisurely.

Ketsui felt like a distillation and intensification of the elements that defined Espgaluda and DOJ. Playing Espgaluda taught me that these games are not just about you navigating fixed groups of enemies and bullets - they are about knowing enemy behaviors and how to manipulate them to your advantage, through techniques like bullet herding and streaming. They are a conversation between you and the game. You manipulate the game and make your survival consistent through careful movement, and the game pushes back by presenting harder and more complex patterns designed to make you flinch. Often you die from panic dodging directly into another bullet, or by accidentally cornering yourself after moving without thinking. Clearing these games requires both knowledge and the ability to keep a clear head and execute your plan in the face of intense pressure.

I wrote about the various set pieces in DaiOuJou, and how they are defined and burned into the player’s mind by their difficulty and threat to the player. I can think of a dozen or so major set pieces in DaiOuJou, representing moments of high difficulty and danger. In comparison, there are so many threats and dangerous moments in Ketsui that the whole game becomes burned into your mind. When common enemy types or every late-stage boss pattern has the potential to kill you, even after over 50 hours of practice, there are no longer specific set pieces that you mentally prepare for throughout the run. Instead your concentration is on high alert for the entire run, as threat after threat keeps coming at you in a steady building waves that don’t end until you run out of lives, or you have cleared the game.

This stage 4 enemy (not even a boss or midboss) ended so many of my runs. Screenshot from a few seconds before I died to it on my clear run.

“Determination”, the meaning of “ketsui”, becomes the best possible descriptor of what it takes to succeed. As I wrote about with DaiOuJou, the worst type of damage shmups can inflict on you is mental - the only way to truly die, is to give up. As long as you have determination, you can keep moving closer to success, however slowly.

At the same time, having determination to clear a game can feel like being a prisoner, or being in hell. The word “goku” in “jigoku” literally translates to “prison”, making the imprisonment aspect of hell explicit. Unlike theology or real life however, with shmups the jailer and the prisoner are always the same person: you. At any time, you can choose to escape your prison - simply give up and stop playing. For some games that arguably aren’t worth playing, this might be the best choice.

To me, there is another way to escape the prison, and cut the bonds that make your life hell. You can take accept and take responsibility for your own private hell, and live your best possible life within it. Like Ketsui’s doomed protagonists, we can find our own meaning in life even when it shackles us to an unavoidable fate. Like them, we can live and die knowing that our life is temporary, and hopefully try to make the world a little better in the process.

Playing shmups, especially hard ones, can require a lot of concentration. Being distracted at the wrong moment can mean losing 20 minutes of a promising run. Usually, I play shmups in a home office where I can be isolated from all external distractions. However, the environment I spent the bulk of my time playing Ketsui was an open space where people are constantly moving around and talking to each other (including me, while I played) - I didn’t have access to a private room. Rather than my usual gaming PC and large monitor, I used an Android tablet with an 8-inch screen that is about the smallest size I would seriously play shmups on.