Snow Battle Princess SAYUKI | 雪ん娘大旋風

To properly talk about this game, you’re going to need a brief history lesson. Around the mid-2000’s, Starfish-SD got the license from Taito (yes, the Taito that made Space Invaders and Bubble Bobble) to make a sequel to an arcade game made by them called Kiki Kaikai, which is best known overseas by its SNES adaptation, Pocky & Rocky. Things were going fairly swimmingly… until Square-Enix acquired Taito as a fully-owned subindustry. For whatever reason, Square-Enix had a problem with it, and revoked the Kiki Kaikai license from Starfish-SD, as well as other Taito licenses that other developers had their hands on at the time (Balloon Pop on Wii/DS was a similar case, as that was going to be a Pop’n Pop sequel). After a bit of rocky development, the game was finally released in 2007 as the game that you see here, albeit called Heavenly Guardian (or Legend of Sayuki, if you’re in Europe), on PlayStation 2 and Wii. Learning about this and seeing gameplay of it, I thought, “Man, Square were a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for not letting this be a Kiki Kaikai sequel.” And the pedigree that Starfish-SD had supported my agenda, as it is made up of former Hot-B developers. If you go back even further…

Pretty fun little Shoot Em Up game. Both the sprite works with character designs and soundtracks are really good.

a good substitute until Kiki Kaikai landed steam

So, I have this game on other systems. Switch and on Wii under the title of Heavenly Guardian. I've only now taken the time to really try to play the game and I must say there's a reason why I could never before. This game is a top-down (or isometric) run n gun similar to Pocky and Rocky-- fitting because I believe it was originally supposed to be that or an ex developer worked on both. Something like that anyway. My opinion of this game is overall pretty poor. It's hard, as are a lot of Natsume games, but this game expects you to basically beat it in one go. It doesn't save after you beat a level. It intrigued me due to it's anime style and the fact it's coop but even that can't save it. It runs pretty poor sometimes too. There's a bit of slowdown. Not to mention the Steam version doesn't even fill the whole screen. You run, you pick up power ups, you shoot. The enemies are all pretty stupid and at times can be bullet sponges. Cheap hits from enemies jumping out of bushes,suddenly appearing out of nowhere, in a game that doesn't have the quick precision like a twin stick would have. This is a very poor game. It is older so I won't criticize the graphics much but the sl…