Mahou Daisakusen



Mahou Daisakusen (JP:魔法大作戦, known as Sorcer Striker outside of Japan) is the first game developed by Raizing in the year 1993. It is the start of the Mahou Daisakusen series. The game features a fantasy steampunk setting with four playable characters, each with their own motivations and individual endings.

Mahou Daisakusen had somewhat obscure ports for the X68000 and FM Towns PCs shortly after the Arcade version came out, before being released for PlayStation 4 as part of the M2 Shot Triggers lineup.

Story


No one knows when it began. The mobilization of the Goblins gradually expanded, until they at last succeeded in establishing a single Empire of their own.

All this weighed heavy on the brow of King Codwenna. He gathered all the loyal knights at hand and launched an attack on the Goblin Empire, but it was a total disaster. All he managed to learn was that the Goblins were ruled by a single charismatic leader—a human no less—and that the development and mass production of magical weapons was well underway.

The King was shocked. Magical weapons, which used mana to operate, were known to exist. But no one had ever succeeded in reproducing them, and their full operation was limited and not well understood. What could the Goblins be plotting…?

The King foresaw the approaching doom of his kingdom. But the Order of Knights themselves had failed! After much internal debate, the King decided to place a tremendous bounty on the Gobligan King’s head.

Now he could only wait for a hero to arrive and save them all…

Gameplay Overview
Mahou Daisakusen is a 2 buttons game. The game has 6 stages and a final stage that is simply a boss fight (referred to as "stage 6.5" by some sources) before moving on to the second loop.



Controls



 * A button: Fires standard shots from the ship at a semi-automatic rate.
 * B button: Activates a bomb. Bombs are the same between characters. The bomb will take a few frames to detonate if it does not touch a enemy, solid object or the top of the screen. If any of the listed are touched by a bomb, it will go off immediately. I-frames from the bomb are only active for as long as the bomb explosion is on screen.

Extra Lives
Extends are awarded every 300,000 points during the first loop. There are no 1UP items or other ways to gain extra lives.

Characters
Gain

Chitta

Miyamoto

Bornnam

Rank
Rank in Mahou Daisakusen is a composite of several contributing elements. It affects enemy HP, the number of bullets fired by enemy attacks and the timing and frequency of enemy attacks.

There is also a survival element that increments every 4096 frames. This resets to 0 upon death and at the beginning of each stage. The maximum rank value is 63.

Reaching specific rank thresholds will trigger different behavior in some enemies like Skull Howard's main pattern gaining 2 extras bullets and the stage 4 green dragon bombers firing as soon as they appear, both of these can be seen during the second loop.

Loops
The second loop features considerable higher rank and is much harder as a result. The player can no longer earn extends and won't release any sub-weapon items after dying. Due to the increased rank, enemy HP and aggressiveness are drastically increased. Some enemies have different behavior, such as the stage 1/5 wizards' bullets gaining slight homing capabilities.

Scoring
Scoring is very simple and consists mainly of destroying enemies, any destructible projectiles and collecting excess items.

Milking
Many enemies will fire projectiles in some way or leave minions when left alive for long enough. However, the highest scoring sections opportunities for milking are the bosses. Destroying Breath Dragon's left or right head will make it release flying enemies more often from the side that was just destroyed. Violent Slime's destructible bullets can also be milked for points to some degree. The most important boss in this regard is Bashinet Special (the Stage 4 encounter) and his spinning pods as each one of them is worth 5,800 points. Unfortunately, because the boss patterns are selected at random, whether the player earns a considerable amount of score or very little is heavily reliant on luck.

Surplus items
Power-ups will grant points once the player has maxed out their shot and sub-weapons respectively. This does not apply to bombs as they never cap, though the graphic stops updating after reaching 9 bombs.

Due to the random trajectory of coins after being released a good strategy is to fly on top of the flying sacks as they appear before firing, but this isn't always possible.

Example Scores
A typical score at the end of a first loop where a large portion of enemies and all bosses are destroyed might be 1,500,000. Record scores at the end of the first loop exceed 1,900,000. See the STG Hall of Records for more scores.

Strategy
For video references see: Mahou Daisakusen/Video Index

Development History
This is the first game developed by Raizing, a video game developer founded by former Compile staff: programmer Yuichi Toyama, pixel artist Kenichi Yokoo, graphic designer/planner Kazuyuki Nakashima and freelance composer Atsuhiro Motoyama. Toyama wanted to make arcade games after being involved in the development of Seirei Shinsei Spriggan and Spriggan Mark 2, and moved to Tokyo after being encouraged by his contacts Tomonori Fujisawa and Masato Toyoshima, both from Naxat Soft, leaving Compile alongside Kazuyuki Nakashima to form Raizing. The game started development in 1992 with the team working in a single room of an apartment. Nakashima describes it as "a picture of hell" but despite of this, it allowed them to develop a very strong, colorful game, using the Toaplan Version 2 board as the hardware. Initially, it was centered around Chinese martial arts under the title of Haougekiden Saifuaa (覇王撃伝 砕破, "Dynasty Shooting Legend – Blast!"). This concept was short-lived and didn't make it past the planning stage as Toaplan staff, who were in contact with the team advised them, saying that "shooting games should have worldwide appeal". This led to the concept being reworked into a fantasy-themed shoot em' up in order to appeal to the ever-growing audience of console RPGs.



The team wanted to give the game a strong sense of character and story, adding character dialogue during stages. They also included steampunk elements such as mecha designs to enemies in order to make the shooting feel more flashy. Some aspects of Compile's Musha Aleste can be seen in the final game like the power-up system as mentioned by Yokoo, who considers it one of his favorite games, and the "Dire 51" rival ship, reflected in Bashinet and his seemingly countless encounters seen throughout the game. Raizing struggled to decide the title for the game, Yooko mentions the team had 108 rejected titles before being done. The final title for the game was intended to be Mahou Daisensou (魔法大戦争, "Great Magic War"), even having the in-game graphics for it finished. However, seeing the game Kaitei Daisensou (海底大戦争, released as In the Hunt for western audiences) shown by Irem during that year's AM Show prompted the team to brainstorm once again. In the end, they settled for the title Mahou Daisakusen.

Sorcer Striker
This is the international version. It features much lower difficulty in comparison to its Japanese counterpart. A exception to this is the Korean release, that starts roughly the same as the Japanese version difficulty-wise but slowly increases higher, being the hardest version of the game there later on. Both versions have the intro sequence and character's dialogue translated to the English language.

PS4
This is a version developed by M2 released in 2017 for PlayStation 4 as part of their Shot Trigger releases.

TBD

Rejected titles
The development team went through a total of 108 failed titles before settling on Mahou Daisakusen. Here are some of the most noteworthy ones:


 * Elemental Armor (エレメンタルアーマー): Sounded cliché and it was too similar to Elemental Master, a shoot em' up by Technosoft for the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis.


 * Destroy the Magic Castle of Gladiolus! (魔法要塞グラジオラスを叩け！): It was supposed to evoke the image of an old adventure story.


 * Fun Ball (フン・バル): Everyone liked it but still, no dice.


 * Mahou Keiji (Magic Cop) (魔法刑事 - マジックコップ): Would have been a shoot em' up where you catch magic criminals.


 * Shuyaku (シュヤク): Was supposed to make you feel like the shuyaku (main character). Failed.


 * Spell Dynamic (スペルダイナミック): Someone liked Dynamic Pro…


 * Death Pegasus (デスベガス): Death + Pegasus…lacked oomph.


 * The Invincible Magic G (無敵魔導Ｇ): Sounded like a single hero story, not good.


 * Magic Sensei (魔法先生): Would have been a shoot em' up where delinquents receive correctional education at magic school…


 * The Fearless Mages (命知らずの魔導師達): It was just too manly for everyone.