KIKURA Reviews

NO

Steam reviewers have bad opinions as per usual, game owns.

After having Kikura wishlistet for a while now, I was really looking forward to this release. Finally I thought, someone who takes the Guwange aproach to Bullet Hells. Uff, buuuut I was really disapointed once it came out. Booting up the game, i was greated with the unity startup prompt. Oh boy, I thought; out of all gaming engines, you guys took THE ansolute worst engine for creating shmups or Bullet Hells. Ok, so...maybe these developer(s) are really skilled to handle the engine for these type of games. Sadly they´re not....so this is another entry of a cheap atempt to create a Bullet hell in unity which utterly failed. So, let´s dive a bit into the details, shall we. Kikura really took the aproach of Guwange, in terms of theme and Autoscrolling, but took the movement system of KikiKaikai (Pocky and Rocky). The Movementsystem was something I always consider to be a bother and it was something that may work for the P&R Gameplay, which is a lot clearer and slower, but with the autoscrolling nature of Kikura it is a bother and it makes the game a lot more difficult or even unfair, for all the wrong reasons. Sure, make games difficult...BUT make it so the game stays fair. It would be a lot easier (to program) and way more intuitive (to play) to take the classic aproach to Bullet Hells and go with the "rolling gunner" or "Deathsmiles" kind of secondary shottype to accomplish the all direction shooting. So, the controls are wonky the same way they are in the KikiKaikai series. Now, let´s talk about the graphics: High resolution graphics are not always a good thing, and this is a great example of it. The High resolution graphics look like they´re supposed to be for a arcade/mid2000 kind of pixelated look, but in HD and something like this ALWAYS looks weird on so many levels. Either do an arcade kind of aproach to your style, like Crimzon Clover or the 2000era Cave games did. Or go with hig resolution and effects and create it in one overall artstyle (like Danmaku Unlimited for example). So...in terms of graphics the devs took the Touhou kind of aproach....but NOT in a good way....Touhou aren´t great games, because of their graphics.....the Touhou hames are amazing because of how they play, feel and sound like. I will not go further into details regarding the graphics, here....color composition is a mess and the characterarts look like hells business (comming from an artist myself). Just sell the game to a higher price, hire an artist and put more effort into it and it could´ve been a great shmup entry. Talking about effort. I mentioned this before that Unity is probably one of the worst engines when it comes to shmups. I already was suspicious about the fact that this one requires Windows 10 as minimum (what´s totally odd for the type of game). But with Unity behind it, this makes sense. Unity requires a lot (!!!) of recources for stuff that´s not even needed for a 2D Bullet Hell game. The result is that you need to understand how unity works and tweak to a point in heaven to get even an acceptable performance out of it....and even then, we´re not talking about performing great. In Kikura in particular, the life-lengths of bullet objects seem to be way too long...usually you kill bullets which are off screen, so they don´t take up to much of your computers performance. And especially when you´re working with HD graphics. But even for HD graphics you wanna create them in the exact resolution needed and not higher than that, to save up recources as well. So, what´s the result of it: Heavy input lags and framerate drops, to a point that the game isn´t even playable. I´m not talking about intentional slowdowns (like in cave games) but real framedrops and slowdowns due to the games bad performance. These slowdowns increase the more bullets are on screen. So, now combine these components all together and you´ll get a game, where it´s not even playable in a way it´s supposed to be played. Are there even positives here? Yes....the soundtrack is really amazing and I loved what I heard so far. I wish the ost would´ve been given into hands of people who actually know what to do with it, to create a spiritual successor to Guwange. Kikura remains a failed attempt to create something great because of lackluster development and the absense of artistic and development skills. As an advice: just take the music and create a Music CD release out of it, it´ll probably sell for way more, than the actual game. Or take the music and collaborate with skilled doujin circles or development teams.

Refunded! Long loads, eternal patching through external sources instead through steam, controls on arcade stick or keyboard not being recognised. Stay away from this one!

I decide to write this review because I feel some of the "not recommended" reviews are unfair to this game. This game has beautiful wafuu music and zun-like character art styles. 1. About the difficulty: This game NEVER says it is a doujin game for a CERTAIN shmup/bullet hell series, so one should not expect the similar difficulty levels between them. I don't know if nowadays shump/bullet hell players expect to 1cc the easy difficulty for any game of this genre at their first try. For an arcade shump/bullet hell game, even the easy difficulty would be hard for a newbie. 2. For those who left bad reviews before even understanding how the game systems work, READ the goddamn manual before playing the game! This game has more to understand on the game system side e.g. Guwange-like scrolling and obstacles, Kakusei-like system from Espgaluda, and Ren-Dama system. The game manual is not as difficult to understand as e.g. Hellsinker. Those bad reviewers would probably also think Hellsinker is a kusoge.

Note: I did the updated translation of the story segments Great music, great visuals (esp. the use of colour), the REN system feels really good to pull off - fun game The recent major update addressed a lot of things brought up in the reviews here and elsewhere, making it a much better experience overall - give it a try!

An amazing game. Fantastic Music, Art, and Visual presentation. Feels like a steal at 5$. - Having read the negative reviews, it would seem the major update on [9/25/22] addressed the problems, both game mechanic and performance wise. I've had no performance issue with the game and it runs and plays fine with no noticeable problems or gameplay grievances on my end.

Kikura is a different take on the shmup genre, One could say that this was heavily inspired by the game Guwange. Grounded enemies and constantly relying on your meter to cancel. I love cancelling bullets in any shmup game. I got the clear on Hard. It took some getting used to but overtime you start to realize that the game is overly generous with how many lives you could truly have. Especially taking the life stone from the cauldron in stage 2 and destroying the cauldron at the end of stage 5 to gain full life. Type A does more damage but is a straight forward shot and youll need to adjust your position more frequently. It also is a bit slower to build the cancel meter. Type B is more of an AOE attack that builds the cancel meter quickly, the focus shot on type B if close enough can wipe out enemies instantly. in exchange you do slightly less damage to bosses. This game is truly awesome for a doujin shmup. The only problems people are experiencing is the classic Unity problems and performance issues with people that have lower end PC's. I really enjoyed playing this, for 5 dollars this game worth it. Good luck on that last pattern.