Hishouzame

Hishouzame

Title screen

Developer:	Toaplan
Music:	Masahiro Yuge Tatsuya Uemura
Program:	Person A
Art:	Person B
Release date:	1987
Previous game:	Slap Fight
Next game:	Kyuukyoku Tiger

Hishouzame (飛翔鮫, Hi Shou Zame, Flying Shark or Sky Shark in North America and Europe) is a vertically scrolling shoot-em up developed by Toaplan in 1987. It was published by Taito in Japan, Romstar in North America and Electocoin in Europe. The Japanese flyer romanizes the title as Hi Sho Zame, using a non-standard combination of romanization systems. This article refers to it exclusively as Hishouzame, to accurately match the original name of the game.

It was the third shoot 'em up developed by Toaplan but the first to use the new Motorola 68000 microprocessor. This new processor allowed for more onscreen sprites which allowed the designers at Toaplan to become more creative with enemy patterns and graphical touches. It was also the first Toaplan game to allow players to scroll the screen left or right.

Many ports of Hishouzame were released to many different consoles and often named Flying Shark or Sky Shark in North America and Europe. M2's ShotTriggers division released a port of the game for PS4 and Switch in 2022.

Gameplay Overview

Hishouzame is a prototypical Toaplan shoot 'em up with 8-way joystick movement, a shot button, and a bomb button.

Weapons

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• A (Press): Fires a shot. Tapping A fires many more shots than holding A.
• A (Hold): Auto fires but the shots do not repeat very fast.
• B: Launches a bomb. The bombs in this game generate circular fire that only affects that area of the screen. The bombs are not screen clearing and repeatedly damage enemy until the fire disappears. The bombed area also cancels all bullets that enter that area.

Items

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Item	Description	How to Get
Power Up	Increases the number of shots fired at a time by two, for a maximum of 5 upgrades	Spawns upon shooting down all red planes in a pattern (red planes do not appear at maximum power)
Bomb	Adds a bomb to the player's total Bomb stock	Spawns upon shooting particular land targets like tanks or turrets on ships. The harmless trains in Stages 4 and 5 will always have a bomb item in their last carriage. Only one bomb item can appear on screen at a time, meaning that the player must be careful if several bomb item locations are close to each other.
1UP	Awards the player with an extend	Spawns upon shooting down all white planes in a pattern, which randomly take the place of yellow planes with a 1/16 chance. Once the white planes have appeared no more will until either a death or the next stage is reached, and they will never appear in stage 1. After two 1UP items have appeared (the item itself, not the white plane formations), no more white planes will appear at all.

Power Item Locations

The red plane formations that drop a power item replace the yellow formations in specifically designated areas depending on the player's current power level:

• Stage	Areas
  1	0 - 8
  2	9 - 17
  3	18 - 26
  4	27 - 36
  5	37 - 49

• Power Level	Power Item Areas
  0	All
  1	5,9,11,14,19,22,25,29,31,33,34,35,38+
  2	10,13,19,23,28,30,33,35,38+
  3	13,22,29,31,35,38+
  4	12*,22,28,34,38+
  5	None

*Although this area is designated eligible for power item drops at this power level, no such plane formations actually appear here.

Rank

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Hishouzame has a simple rank system with a maximum value of 15, and is determined by the formula (area+loop*50)/8 + difficulty
with area referring to the player's progress through the game. Rank primarily affects enemy bullet speed and the frequency of enemy attacks.
Enemy bullet speed has a maximum value of 21 and follows the formula 13 + rank/2 + loop + power
Large enemies also undergo HP scaling: HP = base + rank * 2 + (loop & 15) * 4 + power * 2
This means that enemy HP continues to increase by a small amount (4) with each loop, peaking every 16 loops before suddenly dropping by 60 again to repeat the cycle.

Loops

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Hishouzame loops indefinitely but from the second loop on, stage 1 is skipped as it was designed as an easy introductory stage for beginners. The enemy bullet speed increases by 1 each loop until the maximum value of 21 is reached. Eventually an overflow is reached at which point bullets will be given a calculated speed of 0 and become completely stationary. Using the formula above this can be calculated to occur at loop 65512 while at maximum power and rank.

Scoring

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Points are awarded by shooting down enemies and blowing up destructible environments like bunkers and mountains. Like most Toaplan games, Hishouzame loops infinitely, and scoring is essentially done by clearing several loops. There are, however, a few details that can improve the player's score on a given loop.

Power Ups and Bombs: Collecting power ups and bombs yields 150 pts each.

End Stage Bonus: 3000 points are awarded for each bomb left over at the end of the stage.

Yellow Planes: Shooting down all yellow planes in a pattern yields 1000 pts. Once fully powered up, the red planes are replaced with yellow planes, providing the player with the ability to increase their score even more.

Stage 3 Boss: While the boat boss in Stage 3 is still motionless, the central area can only be partially damaged but not destroyed. However, the player will still be awarded tick points each time they shoot at the boss, and can improve their score by shooting at it repeatedly. If using a high autofire frequency and staying really close, it is possible to get around 10,000 points from this trick.

Strategy

Bombs

Since the game takes away all of your bombs at the end of the stage to make you restart with 3 bombs in the following one, and because the game drops many bomb items through the course of the game, the player is greatly encouraged to use them to get rid of the harder enemy formations, especially in the last two stages in higher loops.

While each remaining bomb at the end of a stage is worth 3,000 pts, it is fairly low compared to points earned by sheer survival and clearing multiple loops.

Story and Setting

The Background story of Flying Shark is sparse and minimal with the game only explaining it on his flyer:

"The war was in its final stages and our bases were almost completely occupied by enemy forces. Finally, we asked him for a mission, hoping he would be able to save our lives. People called him “flying shark." " 戦乱は末期をむかえ我が軍の基地はほぼ敵軍に占領されてしまった。 そして我々は起死回生を託してついに彼に任務を依頼した。 人は彼を'飛翻鮫“と呼ぶ。 .

The UK version of the arcade game removes the line which reflects that the enemy is close to the base but is otherwise exactly the same story.

The planes in the game are biplanes which shows World War I tech. However, the tanks and bomber plane show World War 2 Technology.

In an interview, Masahiro Yuge states that the Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now was the inspiration for the setting. A company trip to Thailand also helped form the scenery in the game.

The North American NES version instruction manual tells the story via a comic. It mentions World War II and how the Sky Shark is the last pilot in the battle. He must break through the enemy forces and save the American POW's.

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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.

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Version Differences

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Trivia

• The BGM "Last fighter" is also featured in Zenohell during Stage 6, in which the BGM is arranged by Emphatic.

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Gallery

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

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References & Contributors

1. Primary info provided by Coreo