Neo Gensokyo Zero

Welcome to Neo Gensokyo Zero! A game made for Touhou Pride Game Jam 2 and a stylish mini action adventure that consists in three levels of robot fighting and two bossfights. A game that for many reasons reminds to me of the old and glorious arcade coin op fantascientific games!

In Neo Gensokyo Zero we play as Sanae, an agent that has to rescue her girlfriend and colleague Reimu (oh yeah, that's a classical coin op arcade trope, isn't it?) fighting robots and other opponents to reach the top of a tower and steal a super secret weapon from the bad guys. A simple and classic plot that works perfectly for a fast action game like this.
The controls are really simple: you move Sanae, you attack enemies and you dodge their attacks. So you have just six control keys (movement, slash and dodge). I like how this is displayed on some screens in the first level (the streets).


Three Furry Jumpers, two Bombers Bots and one Soldier Bot. A concitated epic combat phase! Sanae is always one against many!

The game is a classical linear combat game that I found very similar to Crosscode (both for the setting, characters design and also combat gameplay) but simple enough to play and look like an 80-90's arcade: enemies are different and there are robots armed with bazookas, others with weapon and shield, jumping enemies and also bombers. There's a good variety of opponents with different behaviours, despite being a small game! Killing them sometimes provide some green hearts that are used to heal wounds, anyway Sanae is still rather tough but this isn't a reason not to avoid attacks as much as possible!

Something I liked very much is how the force fields that block Sanae's path have green "pips" that indicate the number of enemies that have to be killed to make them disappear. It's a nice and simple, but clever detail.

I played on normal and I found the game to be rather easy for the most part, except for bosses! With them the game becomes sometimes a bullet hell, but thanks to the cool dodge mechanic that also slows time, it is not too have to prevail, even if I'm pretty sure that now replaying the game at higher difficulty setting would make it still challenging. In any case the gameplay is fun and entertaining, it's enjoyable playing with Sanae that performs her deadly dance dodging bullets and attacking the robots that surrounds her.

Graphically the game is stylish too. Characters are nice, different and cute, the setting is a typical sci-fi metropolis not different from the world of Mega Man or other sci-fi games with (cute) robots and cyborgs, anyway it's still detailed and with a style that match the characters with their bright coloured sprites. Music and sounds are also very good, so here there's not much to say except that's very good!


Yeah, uhm, probably! Hey isn't she cute?

Speaking about the plot and story I must say that there's not a lot of events but there are some "twists", if I can say that, that makes it a bit more complex than those game that are just "kill the bad guy to save the girl". Anyway this is still an action game, not an adventure or an rpg.
The game in fact is just a sequence of combat encounters with different groups of enemies (remember! The bad guys always attack in little groups, nevel all at once! And strongest one are always all alone!), sometimes there are also distant enemies that cannot be killed but provided an additional difficulty with their ranged attacks, in any case the real challenge are the bosses and their many different ways to cause pain!

Verdict!
This game is impressive considering it was made in just two weeks! It's an amazing simple game, really easy to play and entertaining. All actions and quick reflexes, it's a fun game but also has a cute graphic style and coherent setting and mood. The four difficulty settings makes this game playable by anyone so there is no excuse not to play it!
And also........ suspance... no bugs! Yeah, it's incredibly polished and nice! Pity is so short and simple in fact my only gripe is that this seems like a first episode of a series (or a demo), but I hope we will have more games to play from this developers.
So thank you for this one, it was really good from the beginning to the end! 4/5!