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Radiant silvergun sprite10/2/2023 The involved storyline is told during play in a manic babble of Japanese voices. By the end of the game, the action has escalated absurdly: you're in the galaxy attempting to slice hulking spacecraft in two with your quivering sword. You begin flying over a sunlit coastline, shooting down swarms of flitting foes while the camera wheels and twists in exciting ways. The game's stages build in scale and drama like the most ostentatious space anime. In presentational terms, the game draws more heavily from the anime tradition than its video game inspirations: you pilot a flying mecha, known as an Xbreed, equipped with a bullet-eating plasma sword and orbited by a cluster of bullet-firing lights, known as Lucis. Your Xbreed's health bar and special move gauge are cleverly displayed on a micro-HUD below the ship itself. Its six stages offer a cacophony of visual noise and spectacle tempered by a scoring system that encourages thoughtful, considered play. This shoot-'em-up rejects the frantic bullet-dodging ballet of Cave's niche-dominating output and instead draws inspiration from Squaresoft's Einhander and Treasure's Radiant Silvergun: games defined by dramatically tilting camera angles, a cinematic journey through distinct levels and intricate scoring systems. Astebreed, a lavish indie game from the Japanese studio Edelweiss, is one of the first to suggest a new dawn in indie-game fashion: a return to the coarse polygons of the 32-bit era, when Sega's Saturn and Sony's PlayStation boldly explored the potential of 3D art. This freshening cycle may yet be replicated in video games: NES-era pixel-art has enjoyed a long and profitable revival, particularly within indie games, where the aesthetic has provided other, technical advantages to the semi-professional game-maker. Astebreed is a smart and slick indie shmup from Japan that moves the aesthetics of retro gaming on from sprites to 32-bit polygons.įashion is cyclical, circling in dependable 20-year loops that enable clothes-makers to sell styles back to us that, not so long ago, they insisted were outmoded.
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