Shinorubi feels like a game created by instructing an artificial intelligence specialized in video game development (coming soon, no doubt), feeding it information about various historical works of a certain nature, and then publishing whatever it spits out. That might sound mean to the people who created it, but it’s an apt descriptor nonetheless.
Shinorubi has the odd misfortune of degrading depending on your screen size. On our 55” panel, the experience was somewhat shocking. Fulfilling the full 16:9 aspect ratio and playing in a vertical format, the player’s ships are huge, with a giant pink jewel on the nose dictating the hit-box area. Each pilot has a different type of shooting, supported by simple shooting, laser and bomb placement, as well as a fever boost mode that is triggered by collecting stars. The Shinorubi appears to run at 30 frames per second, but on a large flat screen it’s so sharp it’s hard to tell. Each ship in the game, with its various strengths and weaknesses, travels at extreme speeds to cover the play area, requiring incongruous firing of lasers just to quell the strange slippage of their movement. The bigger the screen, the more prone you are to accidentally bumping into bullets, which isn’t helped by the laggy controls, and everything just seems to stutter slightly. When you die in docked mode, it’s not because the game is overly difficult, it’s because you’re struggling to make sense of the action.
The graphics are also, frankly, terrible. Drawing on Cave’s worst pre-renders, it’s shiny metallic and inhumanly plastic; and, aside from the stage two thunderstorm, it appears to be exactly the same stage background repeated, only with rearranged elements. The attractive presentation of the menu is completely pink, but the game itself is an unsightly fluorescent green. It’s also one of the few shoot ’em ups we can remember where we didn’t like the aesthetics of the bullets.
In addition, having opted for a widescreen design – not the first choice for this genre – it has bullet patterns that we have very little respect for. It’s not entirely the developer’s fault, but the arrangement of patterns that have geometric certainty fundamentally changes when you have three main levels of activity: left, middle, and right. Some of the patterns seem to have no real apparent thought. The game also drops bomb icons a lot, which looks like, “Here, let me fix that mess you can’t get out of quickly.”
The saving grace is that the Shinorubi works much better in manual mode. It doesn’t look as annoying, the main designs are quite durable, the framerate doesn’t look as sloppy, and your ship, while still excessively fast, can travel across the screen with greater ease. If you play it on a portable device, you can have fun with its various modes, from which it is packed to the brim: boss races, caravan trials, Muchi Muchi pork-inspired jump score gameplay (more interesting than default, honestly) and a three-loop Journey event. The music is also, if you enjoy endless guitar solos, well executed and suitably heavy.
We can’t recommend you buy Shinorubi over other games in the genre, but in handheld mode, thankfully, there’s still something for diehard fans to play for, if only out of curiosity.
