Dodonpachi DAI-OU-JOU (Cave/AMI, 2002)

Death is a natural part of life. Just as there is birth, there is also death waiting at the very end of the bargain. Nothing lasts forever, and everything comes to an end. It is the way nature works. Why not accept the idea and embrace it? Because once we have accepted death as a natural part of life, then we have also made amends with another natural part of life as well: with living.

The subtitle of Cave's third sequel to their flagship DoDonPachi series reads "Dai-Ou-Jou", which translates to "die a natural death" or "peaceful death". I see it this way: DDP-DOJ is a game that is so hard, that you better get used to the idea of dying if you want to enjoy it. The rule can be applied to every other shooter, but DOJ embraces this idea with its title, along with its beautifully poetic poster art, which stands with me as one of the greatest videogame covers ever made.

Contrary to what I mentioned about its difficulty, the game itself isn't that impossibly hard; it is playing it the way it wants you to play it (for score), which makes it incredibly difficult, and that is through its chaining system while dealing with its rank. That, in addition to filling the entire screen with bullets the moment you enter Stage 1, a more difficult second loop, and a true last boss with bullet patterns that will wring out the acid from your stomach.

A lot of people point out that this game is evil for many reasons. One reason is the rank system. Whenever you're surviving and scoring well at the same time, it will "reward" you with a special power-up known as a "Hyper", which you can activate by pressing the bomb button.

Collecting and utilizing these Hypers will grant your ship some extreme firepower that could rival the power of the Sun, causing you to rip through enemies while blowing your chain counter through the roof. While using a Hyper during a boss, though, the bullets speed up, increasing your chances of death. So doing this while facing a boss can be an insane decision akin to suicide, but the rewards for scoring will be immense. Plus, it provides for an exhilarating experience for dodging bullets.

As though that weren't enough, each time you use a Hyper, the entire game gets incrementally harder, or ranks up, and bullets will travel faster, but it will all cancel out when you die or use a bomb, making the game manageable until you start kicking ass again.

But this is just the beginning. I haven't even gotten started on the chaining. Chaining is the root of its scoring system.

So even after you begin to make dramatic improvements at DOJ, it still feels as though the game remains a step ahead of you at all times, and you don't feel like you can handle the game until you've spent some serious time with it. Thinking about it this way, I could devote my entire life mastering DOJ. I've played it on and off for years since I got the PS2 port, and I still cannot chain the first section of Stage 1 consistently. Maybe my brain isn't wired to intuitively chain enemies or something, but all I know is, if I wanted to, I would have to spend a lot of time getting the hang of it before I got anywhere.

But that isn't why I play DOJ (yet, at least). I love playing it just to see how far I can make it or to see if I can finally nail a chain for a stage. It's not a game I'd like to exclusively devote to, but it is great to play in small doses especially after playing Ketsui, since it deals a lot of punishing frustration, but I always come back to it. I keep my expectations low when I approach DOJ, because I really do believe it takes a masochistic streak to come back to it everyday to get your ass handed to you (but then again, don't all shooters do that?). Despite that, I love the way the game feels. The Type-A ship (paired with Exy) is neither too fast nor too slow for me, and switching from rapid C shot to button A laser feels so satisfyingly responsive, that I can only blame myself if I break a chain or die that peaceful death.

Sometimes I wonder about how popular the DOJ PCB would have been if Arika never ported it to the PS2. Would it have surpassed the ludicrous price of a Ketsui kit or even the relatively insane price of a bare Guwange box (which went for hundreds a while back)? I own both the port and the PCB, so I can attest that I love the game, despite not being good at it at all, but I do wonder.