As intense and frantic like a Cave game, the Blue Wish series is made as an homage to the structure and design ethos of DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu. Same brilliance in its adrenaline pumping bullet patterns and flow of the action.
But happily, it looks and feels much more close to a Takumi shooting game (of Giga Wing, Mars Matrix and Nigh Raid fame). With ship designs that instead of look anime, use the pre-rendered 3D models that were so typical in the mid-90s and early 2000s STG Japanese games. Seriously, this feels like an obscure Japanese shooting game for the Sega Saturn that your friend brought to your home burned on a CD-R, that you never saw covered in a magazine of the time. But that decades later, investigating about the game, you find that is sold in eBay, reaching prices of various hundreds of dollars.
And instead of the boring soundtracks of your typical Cave game, you have a 90s techno soundtrack, that most of the times has catchy and memorable melodic parts, resembling the Yuzo Koshiro compositions for the first two entries of Streets of Rage in its best moments. With well, other moments being more generic and forgettable, like the fourth level track.
Also, it's stupidly friendly for beginners, because in all modes you can play with an auto-bomb action activated, that has a score penalty at the end of the run. And the main mechanic is a bar that you can charge doing damage to the enemies. Once refilled, you can activate a special mode that will serve as a bomb, clearing the screen of bullets. Making all the normal enemies to transform the surrounding bullets in medals once destroyed while you're in this mode. And if you are hit by a bullet while you are in this state, you won't lose a live, but the trance state will end. So at the end, you have other auto-guard option, that also serves to greatly increase your score, no penalties, and that you can use in parts in which you're not so confident of your skills.
Making a super fun ride and accesible 1CC for novices in its Heaven difficulty mode. A super fast paced and challenging, but sill accesible to clear Normal mode. And a demented unlockable Hell difficulty mode for the experts, grating you many hours of entertainment.
The icing on the cake is a scoring system that is simple to understand, full of secrets and small subtle details, offering great opportunities for those mastering the layouts. But still super satisfying for more casual play, thanks to the medal madness that will occur every time that you open an hidden treasure chest in the scenario.
You can say that this is not an original or innovative game, but it makes a much more important thing: to show a masterful lesson in STG design, without a single flaw, and most importantly, opening the genre to all the publics, no matter the level of skill.
