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Tsukihime no Shiro is an old PC doujin shmup inspired by the first Castle of Shikigami. It uses Tsukihime's characters and setting, features similar grazing and coin collection mechanics as Shiki games, but also adds some little twists that kinda foreshadow some evolutions the Shiki series itself will feature later on.

For the longest time I was not able to run this game on my machine, but recently I was told by Krius on the STG Rev discord that it's possible to make it run using wrappers like dgVoodoo or DXWnd. For this specific game and DXWnd (which is what I'm using to run it), you have to go into the "Libs" tab, the GDI subsection, and activate the "Emulated Device Context" option.

This was not the only technical ordeal to deal with since the keyboard inputs are Shift for Shot/Shikigami, Z for bomb and Ctrl for full shot. In true old doujin fashion, you can't rebind those but somehow there's rebinds for controller only. It's usually not a big deal for me since the default keyboard inputs are what I'd use anwyays but the controls are actually nightmarish in this case (Also Z maps to actual top row Z on my AZERTY keyboard, to add to the insanity). So I had to use AutoHotKey to remap the keys properly (this isn't reflected in the input display now I that check it lmao)

Oh, and as far as I can tell, there's no TATE option. Bruh. Maybe it's in the config exe rather than in-game?

What about the game itself though? It's actually good fun! The characters are inspired by Shiki 1 archetypes, but there's also some special ones (they might be unlockable) that have new shiki types like a charged laser or exploding canisters. The character I was using here is a Hyuga type, however she doesn't have three lightning balls that stay in the same position relative to you beore locking on to an enemy. Instead, she has two scanning lasers that will actively swipe left and right to find targets. And even when they are locked on to something, they can abandon their target and focus on an enemy that gets closer to you if necessary since theres no electrib ball right in front of you like Hyuga. This canbe handy at times, inconvenient at others.

Mechanics-wise, you have the coins to collect, the shiki to make more coins spawn, the power system from Shiki 1, and bombs. Timer is per-boss though, and coin value is capped at 1k. Also, the tension multiplier has a very clearly visible gauge at the bottom now, and the multiplier can now go up to 17.999 . Said gauge increases more slowly than the multiplier in Shiki games, but it can go higher. Actually, 17.999 isn't even the cap, because using a bomb when the multiplier is maxed will actually trigger a hyper mode, where you move faster and have a multiplier that's temporarily doubled and also frozen. You can go all the way to 35 and then destroy stuff like crazy during it. Since this was part of a discovery stream (VOD here : https://www.twitch.tv/m_knight_jul/video/1295055124 ) and I was not aware of all the mechanics, I only found out about it during the final boss.

Said hyper is like a mix of the HTM from Shiki 3 as it gives you initial iframes and consumes a bomb, but with the multiplier doubling ability of Sisters Royale's fairies. And that's years before those 2 games came out! One bizarre quirk of the hypers here though is that you also have a short cool down afterwards where your multiplier is literally zero lmao.

I haven't explored the scoring a lot, but I wonder if you can actually use a lot of bombs, score a ton, then SD to get bombs back and repeat the process like Shiki 3. Extends are not capped at 3, so there might be some room for resource management. Power levels also being a thing means you may not even need to SD or get extends as much to get more bombs back.

Another difference in the formula is that characters don't play through the exact same stages. As in Sisters Royale, you'll initially be fighting other playable characters, but here the order and the stages are not similar for everyone. In Normal at least (dunno if it's different in higher difficulties) you actually only fight 3 other characters, and then you are sent to two final boss fights. (Extra and Final).

On the one hand, you can't quickly translate the experience with one character to another since you could face compeltely different bosses and levels. On the other hand, there's more content to explore, and the game's length is pretty short which makes multiple runs and attempts with different characters a fun thing to do.

I'll probably try to clear the Hard difficulty level now, maybe mess with other characters too. The Kim type in this game (I think it's Ciel?) is fun to use as she's noticeably faster than the Shiki 1 equivalent.

There are two more difficulty levels above Hard : Unreal and Paranoia. From what I've played they seem kinda insane and not necessarily super balanced, but perhaps I'm just not good enough at them to appreciate them?

Played on PC, recorded with OBS
#shmup #月姫の城 #STG