Game:

Mushihimesama Futari (2006)

Duration: 23:45

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11

Version without commentary - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyN4dyTqO8

I can finally drink out of my Reco mug with my head held high.

After getting around to setting up and troubleshooting the emulation via Xenia Canary (f62ac98_canary_experimental), I was able to sit down and play a bunch of Futari, eventually resulting in the 1CC with Palm Abnormal. After a while of playing the game, I also decided to set up emulation of 1.5 Arcade via FBNeo in order to take advantage of the save state feature. Despite FBNeo having slightly more input lag, this was really crucial for learning some of the routing for the different parts of stage 5 - especially the part with the hidden extend and the latter half of stage 3. The Xbox 360 port does NOT let you start at the midboss during practice mode, unfortunately.

In general, the game is fantastic. It is very clear to me why it has the reputation it does, as the visual aesthetic, soundtrack, and bullet-canceling hook is very appealing. All of the enemy designs are amazing- I can't really think of a single boss or mid-boss that is forgettable or boring.

However, I do have a few gripes with 1.5 Arcade Original. I feel that it has a relatively uneven difficulty curve, which spikes in the second half of stage 3, lowers significantly for all of stage 4, then ratchets back up from stage 5 onwards. In the video I point out the particular part of Stage 3 where it begins to get bad.

The game is also very backloaded in its resource allocation: Unless you're playing for score, you'll have to wait until the last FIVE MINUTES of the game before you get the last two extends. That's two whole lives and six (!) bombs that you may miss if you aren't good enough to make it to this final part of the game. As you might imagine, this is a huge second wind that can turn a losing run into a winning one. The consequence of such a design is that you must make do with your 3 extends (2 default and the first score extend) until the very end of the game. An easy way to remedy this would be to put the hidden extend in stages 3 or 4. This would make the difficulty curve gentler as players have an additional extend to work with while contending with the harder parts leading up to stage 5.

The final boss for 1.5 Arcade Original is also a huge difficulty spike. I could reasonably learn to dodge more of her patterns after some grinding, but it would take significant effort to beat her without using at least 3 bombs (although I can't speak for others, only myself). This design is a bit annoying because it can make for situations where one "feels" like they've already lost going into the final boss due to lack of resources. It honestly feels like this is working as CAVE intended, given the second wind they engineered in stage 5. The first Mushi doesn't have these issues.

Despite these gripes, I think the game is very high quality and would encourage anyone interested to give it a shot. Its accessibility has gotten much better recently due to Arcade emulation support, and I feel now is a great time to start!

Thanks for watching.

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