The full game title, Mamoru-kun wa Norowarete Shimatta, roughly translates to Mamoru Has Been Cursed, or so I've been told. With the way the game is played, however, it should be called Mamoru Curses Everything Else Before Blasting Them To Bits.
Mamoru-kun is a manually scrolling shmup game. The screen does not automatically scroll here; instead you manually scroll it by walking up the screen. This means you can play at your own pace, dashing through as quickly as possible, or taking your time to fight every enemy you come across. A timer is used to push the player forward, and the game has different endings based on how much time remains.
There are several characters to choose from, with different attack patterns to experiment with. When shooting your enemies, you can rotate your angle of attack to target enemies all around you. Combined with the manually scrolling screen, this gives a lot of different options for smiting everything in your path.
The best feature, however, is the curse button. I just call this the Awesome button, because it does awesome things and generally makes the game a lot more fun to play. Cursing enemies affects firepower and how many point items they drop, in addition to using some cool graphics of them being haunted. Feel free to yell out "Cuuuuurse you!" in your best creepy voice every time you use it.
Graphics are very colorful, with a cutesy super-deformed character designs. Enemies are based on Japanese folklore and just as cute, although don't forget they are trying to kill you.
There is also a story mode that features full screen character art and voice acting. Of particular note, character art was also made for rotated screens (via the tate option), which is really amazing looking when viewed this way.
Mamoru-kun is not ball-bustingly hard like some shmups out there, but has options to increase difficulty if needed. The gameplay has a light-hearted feel to it, to match the graphical style. It's pretty fun, but the lack of challenge may annoy some shmup enthusiasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment