Tatsujin

Tatsujin 達人
Tatsujin (known in English territories as Truxton) is a vertical shooting game developed by Toaplan in 1988. It is the first of a two-game series, with Tatsujin Ou following it. Tatsujin is well-known for its high difficulty, checkpoint memorization, and excellent soundtrack. The game was also ported to the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive in 1989, the PC-Engine in 1992, a port for iOS and Android was released (in Japan only) in 2019, and a PC port via Steam

Controls

 * A: Fires the player's equipped Weapon.
 * B: Releases a Bomb, dealing damage to enemies and canceling bullets within its explosion radius.

Weapons

 * Red: The standard three-way shot type for the player's ship. It does not have any sort of auto-fire. When upgraded, it becomes even wider and shoots many more shots at once, making it very powerful for screen control and point-blanking.
 * Green: A rapid-fire straight shot that deals high damage and can be held for auto-fire. Green does not have a shot limit, allowing it to deal high damage even at further ranges. Higher upgrades increase the amount of projectiles fired.
 * Blue: A blue lightning attack that sticks to enemies and continues to deal damage to them as long as the Fire button is held. Higher upgrades create more lightning shots

Items
Tatsujin has several different collectible items to power up, change weapon type, and gain extra ships. Unlike items in many other games, the items in Tatsujin are stationary, and only move down the screen as the stage scrolls.

The item dropped by each successive item carrier cycles according to the table below. A death will reset the cycle to the beginning. This determines the type of item contained by carriers rather than the item that appears when the container is destroyed. In other words, whether or not an item is actually released has no impact on the progression of the cycle.

Hit Box
The ship's hit box covers nearly the entire ship, excluding the tips of the cockpit and wings. The hit box can be made thinner by moving the ship horizontally.



Rank
Rank increases as the player progresses through more areas of the game. At higher rank, enemies fire more often, and the overall bullet speed increases.

rank = base + area/2

The maximum value is 24. After the first loop the rank no longer changes when a new area is reached and remains fixed at the maximum value of 24.

The base rank value is determined by the region and the difficulty setting:

bullet speed = 24 + rank/2 + difficulty/2 + power*2 + loop*2 The maximum value of bullet speed is 80 and it continually increases each time the game is looped. The maximum speed will be reached by loop 22.

Loops
Like many early Toaplan games, Tatsujin loops infinitely, with each loop starting after defeating the boss of stage 5.

Scoring
Destroy All, Don't Die (DADD Scoring).

Every enemy is worth a flat amount of points, with point gain increasing with every loop. Collecting excess items rewards the player with an extra 5000 points.

Strategy
See Tatsujin/Strategy for stage maps, enemy and boss descriptions, walkthroughs, and advanced play strategies.

Story
The evil Gidans attacked the transport ship Belery. The forces of planet Borogo must retrieve Belery's cargo of secret weapons. However, the Gidans are in between them and the weapons. Fearless ace pilot, Tom the Bomb, volunteers for the mission. Tom's commanding officer tells him to fly the Super Fighter. It is equipped with such power weapons that no one dared using them before. So the lone fighter sets off to far reaches of space to rescue the cargo and defeat the Gidans.

The game takes place in space and passes over 8 asteroids in the following order: Blue, Yellow, Red, Orchid, Purple, Poison, Galaxy Pool, and Magman.

There are 5 Gidan bosses called Monster Powers and they appear at the end of each stage.

Development History
If available, you can include information here about the hardware, the development of the game, and its general reception. Try to have as much information in this section cited as possible.

PC Port
A PC port of the arcade version is available on Steam, released by Bitwave Games on February 14, 2023. Aside from autofire, This version provides an assist feature and other quality of life improvements in order to make the game significantly easier:
 * Includes all versions of the game.
 * Auto-dodging
 * Instant slowdown button
 * Health: Allows the player to take a select number of hits before dying.
 * Hitbox size modification
 * Hitbox display
 * Rewinds
 * Savestates, up to 10
 * Practice mode
 * Widescreen Mode
 * Online leaderboards, only accessible when not using assists.

Trivia

 * Cool facts and random tidbits go here!

Gallery
See (Template Page)/Gallery for our collection of images and scans for the game.

Video References
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