zushi's place

Recently did a clear of an arcade game called Ketsui that I'm pretty happy about!

Ketsui is a top-down scrolling shooter where you play as a pair of pilots in an undercover U.N. mission to stop a global arms dealer called EVAC[1] Industries. The covert nature of the mission meant that, regardless of success or failure, the pilots must not return alive; so the premise is a bit tragic from the start.

Since it's release back in 2003, Ketsui has always had a niche following among bullet-hell gamers on account of its old-school roots combined with great pacing. It also has a notorious hidden boss that took arcade-goers years of practice to clear.

A few years ago, before emulations were a thing, I actually visited on a few remaining arcade venues that still has this game just to try it in person 😊

Structurally, the game is divided into 5 levels. The difficulty curve is quite interesting – stage 5 is extremely long and is harder than all the other levels combined. The music is peaceful here, which is striking compared against the chaos on the screen.

For the run itself, I messed up badly in stage 3 (died somewhere easy and missed a 1-up), but did really well from stage 4 onwards, and managed to beat it with one last ship in stock.

After beating stage 5, I got into the second loop, at the end of which you face the hidden boss. I don't have plans to clear this loop yet, so I ended up doing some commemorative save-states and accidentally scored a pretty humorous death.

I edited out two pauses to answer some IMs during the session, was planning to edit out the wallpaper too, but I ended up liking it as framing and kept it in.

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[1]: a tongue-in-cheek reference to the game's developer, CAVE.

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Categorized under: #gaming