Review: Triggerheart Exelica (XBLA)
I like to think of Japanese shmup games as the digital equivalent of auto-erotic asphyxiation. An innocent bystander stumbling into your bedroom only to catch you with a scarf tied around your neck, naked from the waist down will have the same reaction as someone stumbling into your bedroom only to find you playing Triggerheart Exelica: equal parts revulsion and morbid fascination. It's as if there are no thrills left and the only thing that can sate your slavering thirst for more is a solid 20 minutes of bullet hell. That's not to say that anyone who enjoys a good shmup is depraved, it just feels like a sort of masochism. Each shmup prides itself on being ridiculously difficult and fast, screen filled with bullets and music pumping loudly. It's enough to give any sane gamer a seizure. But this genre thrives, fueled by the frothing demand of crazy people all over the world. Bullets litter the screen in an intricate array, one hit and your character (or ship or whatever) explodes. Enemies keep coming at you as the bullets fly, and eventually you get to a boss who is so ridiculous you wonder how anyone could defeat it without getting hit once. This is where the true appeal of the shmup lies: replaying, memorizing and concentrating until perfection. Triggerheart adds a grappling hook of sorts to the formula, which allows you to capture enemies and swing them around you like a hammer toss, removing any bullets in its path. Which is neat. Grappling hooks are neat!
Triggerheart's main failing is the length of it's story mode. It's short. It literally took me about 20 minutes to play the game to completion. There are two separate anime robot-girl-thing characters you can utilize, each with their own shot pattern and, I assume, their own storyline which may stretch your experience a bit. I say I assume because I didn't have the patience to pay attention to the incredibly generic and melodramatic plotline. Something about someone stealing something from someone else and they are mad about it and then someone sacrifices themselves to save the other person. And then a lot of explosions, and maybe some credits with birds flying over the horizon. You don't play shmups for the story, though. You play them for the ability to wow anyone watching with your bullet-dodging skills. At 800 Microsoft points I can see this being a worthwhile purchase for anyone who wants a nice introduction into the bullet hell class of games, but if you download Triggerheart Exelica hoping for anything but the exact same shmup you can find anywhere else, you'll be sorely disappointed.
Triggerheart Exelica also has the interesting history of being a port of an arcade game, which was ported to the Sega Dreamcast in 2007. That's right, it was released for the Dreamcast in 2007, which shows that system's tenacity to say the least. Sad or awesome? I'll leave that up to you.
Score: 3/5 A fun but short shoot-em-up with a generic plot and okay graphics.
