Once again, in lieu of an actual post, I come with a short ramble on a doujin game introduced to me by Rankendrake, titled Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha Danmaku STG. I’ll probably be doing that Spring Season Anime post when the Spring Season actually starts, since I know Absolutely Nothing about most of the upcoming anime. (Well, except for StrikerS, which is slightly relevant to this post anyway.)

The game, as the name suggests, is a danmaku top-down shooter based (loosely) on Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A’s, with projectiles covering pretty much all of the screen at times. The game has a wide variety of difficulty levels ranging from Very Easy to Nightmare; I used Very Easy for these screenshots because I have no idea what the Pause key was, and it was the only way I could grab screenshots and not, yanno, die. Yes, I suck at games like these.

You have the option of playing as Nanoha or Fate. Nanoha tends to have more spread-out shots, as far as I can tell, and her C-key Special is homing, whereas Fate’s C-key Special is a bunch of straight shots. Any other differences are probably too subtle for me to notice. Arrow keys to move (slowly; no darting around here), Z key fires normal projectiles (that get upgraded if you collect enough bonus power-ups), X key uses up a Cartridge and fires either the Starlight Breaker or Thunder Zanber depending on whether you’re using Nanoha or Fate (they seem to be identical in game mechanics terms), and C key does that homing/straight shot thing and uses up the Linker Core bar. Escape key exits the game entirely.

That small red dot in the middle of the sprite is the hit box; everything else is just artwork, and you only need to protect that dot from getting hit. You have three hit points, after which you die and get a Continue screen (which returns you to battle with all your power-ups intact). Die too many times and it’s game over.

Gameplay is very simple: fight waves of generic enemies, and then encounter a boss. A short dialogue cutscene ensues, then you fight the boss, which has a large health bar at the top of the screen, and different modes of attack depending on how much health is left. Defeat the boss, and continue to the next stage. Repeat. You’ll get to fight all the Wolkenritter, as well as Reinforce (the original) and the Book of Darkness itself. Dialogue sometimes changes depending on whether you’re going through the game as Nanoha or Fate, but I didn’t really bother looking at it in detail, since, as mentioned, it’s a simple game.

Keep in mind, however, that “simple” and “easy” are two entirely different things.

After each stage, you’ll get your points tallied, and a rank assigned, with S rank being the highest. The loading screens are various pieces of fanart, and since Rankendrake has already posted my favourite, I’ll post my second-favourite:

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 5:36 pm and is filed under games, mahou shoujo lyrical nanoha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.