eneuman96 wrote:Otherwise, it's much more forgiving than any Contra, and I feel it's finely tuned enough to be more than a gimmicky art style wrapped around an average game.
Envision it like this... For the shmup stages, keep all the core gameplay the same, but remove the cartoon graphics. In place of the cartoon, change it to a standard space shmup -- i.e., your cup/mug guys are now spaceships instead, and they are shooting bullets at spaceship bosses. Now how do you feel about the game? To me, it's now an utterly average shooter,
at best. Put the game in space shooter clothes and you realize it's inferior to all the classic space shooters we grew up playing. But those cartoon graphics are so special that they hide the mediocrity going on underneath.
As for the run-and-gun stages, I think they're even worse. Remove the cartoon graphics, and insert some generic army men battling some generic aliens, and we would suddenly hate playing it. (Though, I think I sorta hate those stages even with the current art style.)