Danmaku Unlimited 3
Title screen
| Developer: | Doragon Games |
|---|---|
| Official site: | Doragon Games |
| Music: | warinside (BLANKFIELD) |
| Program: | Sunny Tam |
| Art: | Sunny Tam |
| Release date: | Windows: 2017-03-09 Mobile: 2017-08-09 Nintendo Switch: 2018-03-13 PS4: 2023-06-13 |
| Previous game: | Danmaku Unlimited 2 |
| Next game: | Wyver Ultra |
Danmaku Unlimited 3 is a vertically scrolling shoot'em up game developed and published by Doragon Games in 2017. It has a detailed but very purple graphics design, a metal soundtrack by BLANKFIELD, and impressive bullet patterns. The mood seems inspired by Ikaruga, with interstitial philosophical questions evoking lore.
The game supports TATE mode, with the whole UI rotating at a 90° angle.
For replay videos, visit the Video Index.
Gameplay Overview
Danmaku Unlimited 3 features 5 stages to play, 4 difficulty modes (Easy, Medium, Hard and True), each one having a mid-level boss and ending with a boss, and a TLB that`s accessible if Hard or True is completed with no continues.
Aside from the 4 main difficulties, there´s also a tutorial, a standard arcade mode, a "free play" mode allowing to start from the beginning of any level, a boss rush mode, and a "boss free play" allowing to pick any boss to play against, including the TLB.
Each of these modes is available in "Spirit mode" and "Graze mode": in the Spirit mode, killing an enemy turns their shots into spirits (similar mechanic of Bullet Soul), while in Graze mode, the bullets always stay.
The ship has a regular rapid fire wide shot ; a focus shot, more powerful but narrower ; and a bomb that clears enemy bullets. The bomb can be automatically triggered, and as such can be thought of as additional lives, although using a bomb reduces the graze counter: by half if done manually, completely if done automatically.
The gameplay is based on bullet grazing: the ship is surrounded by two circles, and bullets that enter the inner one generate a spark and increase the graze gauge. When the gauge is full, the player can trigger the "Trance" mode: the shot is much more powerful, and generates score bonus items when killing enemies. The bullets on screen are also cleared when the trance mode is activated, and transformed into bonus items.
There is only one ship, but the player can pick different shots types: 5 regular shots types, and 5 focus shot types, some of them being locked behind requirements.
Like most modern bullet hell games, the hitbox at the center of the ship is brightly lit to be very visible and well-defined.
Controls
On Switch
- A: shot
- X: beam (focus shot)
- B: trance
Scoring
Scoring is based on the graze mechanism.
Grazing bullets increases the graze counter on the top left, which acts as a score multiplier. It also fills the graze gauge (on the left, below the counter), which fills when grazing and empties when not, and resets the graze counter when it's empty. Players will need to graze near-continuously to keep both the counter and the gauge full for maximum scoring.
Grazing also fills the hyper gauge on the right of the screen. Once the gauge is filled, the player can activate Trance mode, which does three things:
- it makes the shot more powerful - it clears all bullets on screen, transforming them into gems that are added to the multiplier - it slows down the drop of the graze gauge
Note that in Spirit mode, cancelled bullets leave a "soul" in their wake, which act the same as grazing when touched.
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