TENGAI

I respect any arcade port that doesn't pretend difficulty settings are optional. TENGAI, originally Psikyo's 1996 Sengoku Blade, is the follow-up to Samurai Aces and it makes one immediately bold move: flip the scrolling from vertical to horizontal and swap the planes for characters who fly under their own power. That single design shift changes the feel entirely. You're not piloting a machine. You're a monk hurling prayer beads, a shrine maiden throwing ofuda cards, a kunoichi with a lemur named Socrates. It sounds unhinged, and it is, and the moment-to-moment shooting is better for it. There are five playable characters - Tengai, Miko, Junis, Sho, and Katana - and the differences between them are real enough to affect how you approach the same bullet patterns. Each character powers up by collecting P items, which also summon a personal familiar (Tengai gets a hawk, Miko a water spirit, Junis her mongoose Socrates) that adds a secondary attack layer and charges for an enhanced shot. Lose a hit and you lose power. Lose enough power and your familiar disappears, which heading into a boss fight is close to terminal. Bomb pickups exist but they are sparse and less screen-clearing than you might hope, so the temptation to hold them too long is real. The hit box is only the upper body of your character, which buys a little breathing room, but the bullet density on anything above Monkey difficulty fills the screen fast enough that you'll still eat shots you were sure you dodged. The level order for the first four stages is randomized on each run, which is a classic Psikyo design quirk - and it matters here because visiting a stage later in the run increases bullet aggression and tightens patterns. There is also a day-night visual shift tied to run order: arrive at a stage late and it plays out at dusk or night, which is a small but genuinely nice environmental detail. The boss fights are multi-phase encounters where you can blast off individual components for score bonuses and power-up drops, or just hammer the core. Targeting everything methodically is the high-score play; staying alive through the component phase is a different skill than surviving the stripped-down final phase. Both require attention. The fifth stage throws every prior mid-boss at you in sequence before a branching path into the final encounter, which runs on a timer - clear it too slowly and you get the bad ending. The game doesn't tell you this the first time. You'll find out. On the PC version via Zerodiv, the quality-of-life suite is functional: difficulty tuning across seven levels (the lowest is still genuinely hard for newcomers), configurable lives and continues, controller remapping, and online leaderboards added post-Switch launch. That leaderboard addition was a legitimate gap in earlier ports, and having it here gives the score-chasing loop somewhere to land. Local co-op is supported, which is good news - this is the kind of game that benefits from a second player calling out off-screen bullet clusters. The sprite work holds up with clean parallax scrolling and bosses that transform partway through fights. The soundtrack is competent but has been noted as a slight step down from Samurai Aces, which is worth knowing if the music matters to your shmup experience. Who is this for? Shmup regulars who want a short, replayable arcade loop with meaningful character choice and a difficulty curve that actually bites. The 1CC grind is where most of the life is - casual players who finish it once on easy and move on will probably feel it's over fast. If you came to learn bullet patterns, unlock per-character endings, and claw your way up an online leaderboard one credit at a time, TENGAI has that loop in good shape. Fred, Scout Team