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A clear of the highest difficulty of one of the most unusual shmup releases of the year. Developed by Terarin Games and overseen by Takahashi Meijin himself, Star Gagnant is a crowdfunded joined effort to bring you a new shmup where the central gameplay mechanic is... not having autofire? Probably the only new shmup released that has celebrity endorsement. The game is a throwback to Star Soldier and the various Hudson Soft caravan shmups of the 80's, where you had to score as many points as possible in 2 to 5 minute modes. Hudson Soft yearly held major in-person competitions for these games starting from 1985, which is where the caravan format really took off, with like 300 people attending these events. Autofire wasn't really a thing yet back then and mashing was seen as a highly desirable skill to score higher in these competitions. Takahashi Meijin flourished during this time for being the fastest button masher alive, and his record of firing 16 times per second gained him absolute legend status. He also basically became the sales person for Hudson Soft during this time since, besides the mashing, he was also really good at presenting and marketing the events and games to kids especially. Which eventually garnering a lot of media attention and made him a bit of a celebrity. His extraversion got him appearances on several Japanese variety TV shows and he even starred in a couple of games like Adventure Island. Even to this day he remains a bit of a pop culture icon. He basically made a career out of this that he's still reaping the benefits of to this day. He recently crowdfunded Star Gagnant together with Terarin because he wanted to create a new experience where he can spread the joy of button mashing to a new audience. In this game you mash to shoot and you need to mash faster to reach stronger shot levels. In order to reach max power, you need to mash at 9hz, or 9 times per second, which is uh, a lot. The 2nd highest shot level isn't that much weaker at least, but it does make a difference with speedkilling. There is an autofire button for the weakest shot level, but this does basically no damage and is not very useful. The stronger shot levels consume a meter that recharges over time and by picking up items. This meter drains like instantly for anything higher than 16hz, I assume to counteract external autofire software. Still wild to see a game like this being released in 2023. With the industry and community having left mashing in shmups behind several decades ago, it feels a bit out of touch with modern sensibilities and advancements, where mashing nowadays is mostly seen as an archaic relic of the past that was impractical and also dangerous to your health. Still though, the mashing in this might be a fun gimmick if you're into that, I might just not be the target audience for this. The bigger problem with this game I'd say is the insane input lag. It's about 6 frames from what I've been told, which makes the game not very fun to play. It's also quite expensive at 40 bucks. The game itself is a somewhat average Star Soldier clone but the quality is all over the place. Stage 1 and 3 have decent pacing and action, but the final stage especially has like nothing happening in it. The caravan stages definitely seem much better about this at least. 00:00 - Intro 00:42 - Stage 1 - Space Station 03:37 - Stage 2 - Space Colony 07:34 - Stage 3 - Asteroid Belt 12:23 - Stage 4 - Ice Planet 16:38 - Stage 5 - Fire Planet 21:26 - Stage 6 - Rush Into the Space Fortress 25:44 - Stage 7 - Space Fortress Center 33:46 - Ending & Credits ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Twitter: Twitch:
