Ikaruga Retrospective: Intense Osmotic Ballet Action!

Ikaruga layers an intriguing Buddhist subtext over the on-screen shmupery on display. Each of the five chapters in the game is bookmarked by a title that relates to five Buddhist precepts - Ideal, Trial, Faith, Reality & Metempsychosis. The standout level for this player is the mind-altering Trial. Good luck reading the little text vignettes as they briefly flash on-screen only to disappear in the blink of an eye.

NO REFUGE

Word to the wise. Do not try to explain the gameplay loop in Ikaruga to a new player. All you'll get for your troubles is a hangover headache. It's a bullet-hell shooter after all - Exhibit A in a genre that proudly chews up and spits out newcomers.

No, do not succumb to the temptation to explain it. What is hermetically sealed is hermetically sealed for a reason. Your best bet? Pass on the pad. Your fellow player's natural inquisitiveness (or lack thereof) ample proof of whether they'll get anything out of the audio-visual experience.

But the temptation remains strong. Without it there would be no article to read here. We are a couple of paragraphs in. We are at the point of 'NO REFUGE': the soul-crushing missive the game tauntingly blinks at you as you approach an end of level boss. THERE IS NO BACKING OUT NOW.

Ikaruga is (staggeringly) the work of 8 people - 5 Treasure staffers supplemented by a further 3 from G. Rev. From the sound design to the buttery-smooth framerate it's hard to pick a standout contributor, such is the surfeit of talent on display. It's still worth taking a moment to highlight Yasushi Suzuki's concept art, though.

Shaken AND Stirred: Ikaruga's Difficulty

Whenever I've read articles about Ikaruga's initial arcade release in December of 2001, anecdotal evidence points to a baffled reception. "A puzzle mechanic in a shmup?" That sounds like a hell of a time-investment. My Japanese never quite got off the ground so forgive me when I say it's all there in the game's title; especially without fully knowing if it truly is. You see, the deceptively simple idea behind Treasure’s crown jewel is that the titular Ikaruga - translated by some from the kanji symbol ' 斑鳩 ' as 'mottled dove' - is not only capable of raining down heavy metal death on all and sundry, it can also change polarity on the fly with a simple button press. From white to black and back to white again, your mission is to survive the maelstrom, switching around tactically at choice moments for the highest gains.

Ye olde mottled dove working out its Ikaruga strategy. Look through its eyes and witness a never-before-seen world of black and white vectors. Oddly, it also has a predilection for seeing things in patterns of three. Weird!

Interestingly, in this largely monochromatic world enemy ships are decked out in either one or the other colour; ditto, their bullets. Your task, as with other shmups is to dispatch enemy ships. The twist? You'll do so more quickly here when shooting them down when you’re one colour and they’re the other.

Cycling polarity to contrast that of enemy ships in between showers of bullets allows you to clear the screen faster, and in time-honored arcade tradition potentially unlock a hidden wave of enemies that the game gates away from the uninitiated. You could finish the entirety of Ikaruga armed with this basic understanding of the polarity system, being mindful all throughout its five conflagratory stages that while you can gun down ships of the same colour - albeit at a slower clip - they CAN'T do the same to you.

This is because if your vessel happens to be garbed in black, say, you will absorb like-coloured bullets (either by standing in the path of black enemy ships as they unload their arsenal, or by blowing them up; something that results in a vindictive explosion of bullets). With this knowledge on your side, you’ll quickly learn to carve your way through swirls of black and white bullet-dots, switching polarities on the fly to match anything that won't kill you.

The Ikaruga (lower half of picture) clad in black. One press of a button and the ship alternates to its white form. Bullets are colour-coded in either black or white, as are the ships firing them. If you were to blow up the black ships here without changing polarity, you'll be greeted by a diaspora of black suicide bullets in addition to the regular swirly bullets pictured above.

Absorbing suicide bullets in this intense osmotic ballet (as well as regular bullets) also results in a slight trickle of points to add to your precious total, the game’s version of low-hanging fruit. Doing so not only serves your vanity, however - it’s the only means by which to fill up your Starburst gauge. The gauge is not actually called that but it’s what I like to call it because it makes your ship spontaneously unload in an orgiastic riot of screen-wiping, auto-locked hellfire. Righteous!

(Starburst is a sweet brand; pastilles that result in a similar explosion, only in your mouth when bitten).

Don't sweat it, Fred. Like-coloured bullets don't deal any damage. On the contrary, they'll recharge your homing missile gauge (displayed bottom-left of screen) and add points to your overall tally to boot.

Of course, as opposite-coloured enemies are more susceptible to your bullet fire, it's sometimes advisable to take the high road and risk your neck. This makes you wipe out enemies faster and potentially unlock another wave (more on the chaining system soon). However, as with the best of the arcade crop, there's a risk-reward element in play here.

Collecting suicide bullets by destroying like-coloured ships charges up your gauge (and extends your chain as it would when gunning down opposites), but by doing so it might take a second or two longer and you may not keep your chain going. Piecing it all together tactically - on a wave-by-wave basis; go for same-colour here, opposite-colour, there - and it's positively daunting work to come out with a winning strategy.

I've been playing the game for twenty years, and I'm still working out the kinks. In fact, sometimes it's liberating to just ...

Chain 'Em Up: Ikaruga's Chaining System

The holy grail when it comes to making even the slightest of dents on the games’ online leaderboards leans heavily on its chaining system: dispatching enemy kills of the same colour in threes, no small feat in all the traffic and noise, you'll agree.

Mercifully, you don’t need to alternate colours to keep the chain going - white (x3), white (x3), black (x3) is just as good as B (x3) W (x3) B (x3) - and the longer you can keep the chain going, the more your multiplier soars.

Absorbing bullets - apart from charging up your homing missiles - also has the benefit of adding to your precious points tally (albeit to a much lesser degree), and in the long run could spell a higher ranking over an opponent who’s had a similar run. It can get messy, though, and greed can be your downfall as the like-coloured suicide bullets released on gunning down enemy ships have a homing element to them. Nightmare scenarios include overlapping suicide bullets of one colour over an opposing colour already present on-screen (necessitating wide arcs by your ship in already limited screen real estate), and switching polarities prematurely i.e. before the stray bullets meant to fill up your gauge have been fully absorbed. The resulting explosion will make you resent your avarice.

The immediate (triumphant) wake of unloading your homing attack. Note the white trickle of suicide bullets which like-coloured ships unleash on immolation. Meet these bullets on their path to replenish your gauge; commensurate to the number of bullets absorbed. Changing polarity in anticipation of the next wave of enemies could spell your doom if you don't absorb them in time. Your chain counter (displayed top-left) also keeps track of where you are in each subsequent 3-chain on your path to leaderboard glory. In this case one more white ship would make the counter tip over from 21 to 22. The homing missile gauge is displayed bottom-left, below which is your life counter.

You may be tempted to go all hung-ho and ignore the bullet-absorb mechanic for the above-mentioned reasons, but for starters it’s not likely to get you very far, and secondly charging up your gauge at opportune moments then releasing it at just the right time can help you clear screens that you would have thought were impossible to clear otherwise. Just make sure that the on-screen enemies are all the desired colour when you do so, otherwise you’ll be at risk of breaking your chain.

Ikaruga's Boss Encounters: Eboshidori & Buppousou The imposing boss battles too may be easier to overcome if you go in with a full gauge, with boss clear times being a significant factor in a big point pay-off. And what a roster of bosses it is!

In the interest of not straying too far into spoiler territory, I'll stick to the first two (both are pictured below with a brief explanation in their respective captions).

A screen-filling mech, Eboshidori is your first glimpse of bosses done exceptionally well on Ikaruga's sadistic whistle-stop tour of pain. Totally subjective Japanese to English translation: The White Knight. Turns out I couldn't have been farther from the truth. Thanks to good old Google here, the name apparently means Blackcap. Quite deflating when Eurasian Blackaps are so common where I come from - still they're quite dashing in their own way these days...by association. The liquorish black and white streams Eboshidori unleashes will make you giddy at the knees...for reasons both good and bad.

Buppousou, a.k.a, the crustacean bane of my existence. I threw myself tirelessly at this robotic organism before sussing out what I needed to do to bring it down on the quick...for longer than I'm quite comfortable divulging. It's slow methodical movements belies a vindictive nature second only to Beelzebub himself. In a genius move the best strategy involves getting very close to its grill. Like looking at a crab's stalky orbs from an inch away - it's the stuff of nightmares...brrr. The game's GAME OVER sound-effect, which sounds unnervingly like a death rattle (I once had to inexplicably sit through an audiofile of a real-world example being played at a talk I attended), has been played over Buppousou's lingering, unfeeling presence so many times over the years that it has coalesced into an indelible patina somewhere along the synaptic highways of my brain. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it went off on my deathbed when the reaper finally comes a'knockin' for me.

Holy Crow!

It’s par for the course in the clockwork world of arcade games - particularly bullet-hell shooters - to say successful runs rely heavily on prolonged exposure and muscle memory. And it's undeniable here too: whenever I return to Ikaruga, even after a hiatus of a few years, my fingers respond in a reassuringly familiar way. Lines of approach, micro-adjustments, they're all mostly intact. However, in this player’s mind at least, Ikaruga’s best moments are served when things go awry, when your chain breaks midway through an intense section on the run of your life and pure survival mode kicks in, egging yourself on to keep that hi-score counter ticking over. Better still, it's when a figure emerges from the carpet. These moments really sum up the biggest high I get from Ikaruga: you think you’ve got your frame-by-frame tactics down pat but suddenly an audacious thought worms into your head on your 2000th run through the gauntlet. “How did I never see that? No, I can’t do that - can I?” I suppose it’s the mindset gifted musicians apply to their instruments when they ditch their muscle memory and go off on an improvised run, standing outside of time, in a state of pure flow. The in-game equivalent is seeing a sparkling window of opportunity; one that you didn't clock before and one that can add significantly to your chain counter. Do you dare take it on? Can you hold your nerves steady to execute the unthinkable?

I'm yet to finish the game on a single credit - I can currently make it just past the third level's mid-game boss. My code of honour is such that I have never allowed myself to play out the entire game on the game's infinite continue setting. Except I did. Exactly once. The resultant feeling on seeing the end credits? Self-loathing. Sorry, Shinra, I won't let you down again. Also, whenever I see a black and white Danelectro, I can't help but think of Ikaruga. Sorry, I couldn't help slipping that in somewhere.

End.