Here's a Len'en video. Turn on subtitles for some extra comments.
BPoHC is the fourth game in the Len'en series. It's quite different from the previous games in the series.
Instead of having your normal 5 or 6 stages, this game incorporates a Darius-like route selection. If you stay on a side of the screen, the meter below the screen scrolls to that direction and you progress to that direction. Because of this there are a lot of different bosses and final bosses depending on which route you take.
This sounds cool so far but it kinda falls apart from here.
The enemies in these "cells" consist of waves of enemies chosen at random. The difficulty of these waves range from 'completely trivial' to 'almost impossible'.
Since it's random, it's fun when you get a wave that forces you to be on the opposite side of the screen than the side you want to be on to progress to the next cell.
But wait! In every cell you get a random selection of effects happening! Here are some lovely effects the game can randomly trigger on you:
Gravity/anti-gravity - constantly pushes you either up or down the screen.
Speed-up/Slow-down - Makes you either super fast or slow as a turtle.
Shot Power at Risk - Makes you lose a huge chunk of power when you get hit, even while deathbombing.
Bomb Seal - Can't use bombs.
Flip - Reverses your controls.
Invincible enemies - Can't kill enemies, works on midbosses too.
Drunk Enemies - Makes enemies shoot stupid bullshit.
Shield Break - Takes away one of your shields, which is basically like taking away one of your lives for no reason.
Extend - Literally random extends I'm not making this shit up.
Any combination of these effects can happen. You can no-miss to the last cell and then get some insanely stupid bullshit and lose all your lives there (this has happened multiple times). A good example is an invincible midboss with a hard pattern, reversed controls and bomb seal.
There are so many effects that randomly mess with the players's controls which just isn't fun.
Which brings us to the crux of the game: buying upgrades. The game is a pain to play without upgrades and trivial with upgrades.
Which basically devolves the game into a euroshmup where you just grind upgrades in order to beat the harder modes.
I'm not doing any of that. For this run I'm just playing the normal Extra stage on Level 0000 which means not buying any upgrades. Furthermore I've enabled Insta-Death mode which negates any of the shields you have.
Probably the thing about Level 0000 that sucks the most is the total lack of firepower. You do basically no damage at all and you kinda need a shottype that does a lot of damage already in order to manage. Shion seems like the best shottype for stages but have fun not doing any damage on bosses. Tenkai is one of the only shottypes I've found that is versatile enough to cope with the stages while still being strong enough to do damage on bosses. Dying makes you lose power and losing power really hurts. It also takes forever to build up again. If you're going to die then it's best to die on midbosses since you at least get some power back. If you get Shot Power at Risk with some bullshit combination the chance is high that you lose all of your power and it's pretty much game over. At least in Extra mode you start at max power. In the normal game you start at 0% and building it up is a huge pain.
It doesn't seem super viable to do anything else at level 0000 (except Normal and maybe Hard), but I haven't experimented enough to really know.
Honestly this game feels like a parody of shmups. It's probably one of the dumbest games I've ever played and it's kind of amazing in it's own way like that.
I'm going to let you guys in on a little secret for these here Len'en games. For reasons beyond my understanding, you can only bomb when you're in focus or when you're deathbombing. However, herein lies the exploit. If you put a turbo on the bomb button and hold it, then you'll only bomb when you get hit, essentially giving yourself autobombs (so long as you don't press focus).
EDIT:
For the record, I'm fine with there being a mode with upgrades so long as there is also a proper arcade mode that is properly balanced, like how Stella Vanity does it. Right now level0000 is too underpowered, upgrades are too overpowered, and deciding which upgrades are fine and which are not is too arbitrary. Apparently an arcade mode is still supposed to be implemented so maybe that will fix my complaints.
Download the game here:
[ Ссылка ]
