SHINORUBI

My first hour with SHINORUBI had me questioning whether Last Boss 88 was asking too much of a widescreen monitor. The game runs in a full 16:9 landscape layout rather than the tall tate ratio that danmaku veterans treat as gospel, and the community loudly reminded the developer of that opinion. Yet the further I pushed into those five stages, the more I understood what the studio was actually going for: a modern PC shoot-em-up that fills your ultrawide display edge to edge with light, noise, and the particular ache of a near-miss. The core loop is tight and honest. You pick one of eight pilots, each carrying their own balance of speed and firepower, and you wade into cascades of enemy fire while toggling between a wide spread shot and a focused laser beam. The laser does more damage but slows your ship to a crawl, and it is also the only weapon that charges the Fever gauge. Fill that gauge and it triggers automatically, wiping enemy bullets from the screen and sheathing every enemy kill in a shower of point stars. It is a clean risk-reward tension: burn the laser and rack score multipliers, or stay mobile with the spread shot and stay alive. Those two states, and the moment-to-moment negotiation between them, are where the game finds its pulse. Bombs exist too, and the scoring system quietly punishes you for leaning on them. The roster of modes is genuinely generous for a studio on its first title. Beyond the classic five-stage run and a three-difficulty Boss Rush, there are seven Arrange modes that each reshape the rules: Shield hands you a reusable deflector instead of bombs, Cancel mode rewards you for killing marked ships to void their bullet streams, Pink Pig tasks you with collecting wandering porcine collectibles mid-dodge, and Scratch mode asks you to graze bullets for score rather than avoid them clean. Journey mode chains three full loops with escalating difficulty for players chasing a longer sit. The breadth is admirable. What is thinner is the core stage design. Levels three through five visually echo the opening without much personality of their own, and the bosses are uniformly large spacecraft that strafe horizontally and spit formations. Only the final boss breaks the template, and reviewers across the board flagged this same fatigue. The presentation divides opinion in another direction too. The colors are loud and the particle density is high enough that some players find it a visual wall rather than a spectacle. On a good display the ultra-HD sprite work and 120fps smoothness feel genuinely next-generation for the genre. The soundtrack, composed by William Lamy, keeps pace with the action in a way that fans of Cave-era shmup music will recognize immediately. Five difficulty tiers from Super Easy to Super Hard mean the game can serve as a first danmaku for curious newcomers and a grading platform for 1CC hunters at the same time, which is a rarer balance than it sounds. SHINORUBI is not trying to reinvent what DoDonPachi built. It is a Parisian studio wearing its Japanese arcade influences openly and building something functional, fast, and occasionally beautiful inside that tradition. If you already speak shmup, the Arrange mode variety and the Fever scoring layer give you enough to invest in. If you are new, the Super Easy mode and the near-infinite continue pool mean no one gets locked out. The stage monotony and the divisive widescreen layout are real concessions, but they are the concessions of a passionate first release, not a careless one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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