Fireworks and UFOs: SOS Dan by cho! dancho Haruhi!

(tags game, doujin, Windows, shooting, anime, Haruhi)

SOS Dan (SOS 弾) is a shooting puzzle doujin game made by Mount Punch, based on the novel-series-turned-anime Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, Haruhi Suzumiya's Melancholy). This anime is the hot topic right now for the 2006/04 anime season. As for the name of this game, the school club's name SOS dan (SOS団) is cleverly replaced by the "dan" in danmaku or "curtain fire" shooting, as is popular in doujin shmup games. But this is not a shmup. It was released at Comic Market 69 (December 2005) as trial game, according to the update history, but I got a copy of the finished version at Melon Books (it finally got to Kobe) for 1000 yen. You can try the free 3 level demo at the official home page. There's also some very attractive fan artwork and game play action screens for the game over there.

Basically it's a fast-paced puzzle game where you have to shoot down falling stars with your targeting fireworks and take out UFO bosses. Ever-irate "supreme director" Haruhi (shown above) takes the front line, holds the portable bazooka and barks orders as needed. SOS Dan members Itsuki, Yuki and Kyon stand at the ready, firing the slow homing fireworks to take out targeted stars. Finally SOS Dan "mascot" Mikuru stands as a cheerleader, holding your time-limited power ups such as time stop, speed lock, etc. The puzzle theme is interesting too, shades of PS2 Fantavision-matching like colors at the same time. At first I wanted to compare it to Cabal, that old trackball arcade game in the arcade, but it's not very close to that (heck, I have a craving to just play Cabal). Then again it was more like Missile Command, but with radar and a movable character.

Its very attractive with a gradient night-sky background and colorful falling stars. The characters are drawn very cute, but not exactly the same as the anime moe style. The stars explode in pretty sparkles. Stars that get past your defense impact the ground in earth-shattering kabooms and Robotech-hemishperes of light. There's even asteroid-size meteors that explode into smaller stars. There's never a jarring moment. The music however is a yawner. Luckily it's in OGG format so it's easy to put on the old iPod, yeah whenever I want to sleep.

I'm sure people of the RTS persuasion would get into this, it's a mousing frenzy. Move your character Haruhi left and right with the AD part of the FPS keyboard movement standby "WASD". You can double dash, but there's no jumping or ducking. In a pinch, you can fire a Mikuru bomb with a W (every explosion is a different Mikuru cosplay!). View all parts of the vertical screen by using the mouse wheel. Is this developer some kind of mousing freak, wanting to put his mouse wheel browsing habits into a game?

It doesn't help that the game crashes every once in a while. But other than that, it's a polished game. There's support for replays and even continue.

I tried to like it but it requires lots of skill. The game mechanic is deep. There's the 3 star elimination, the red, yellow and blue homing rockets, the non-combo white stars, the UFOs, the point system, the boss-invite meter. I'm sure in capable hands that combos are a thing of beauty, but oh well. You can either take out falling stars using your normal shot or your lock on shot. If you hold down the right mouse button and click the left mouse button, your normal shot turns into a faster shot, but it no longer detonates stars. It's more for the other "enemies" in the sky, the UFOs.

Lock on is activated with a right mouse press-and-hold and it takes an annoying half-second for the target lock to be acquired. There just doesn't seem to be enough time to lock on to the cluster of stars that give you a high score. Then you have to mouse over to the bottom left (Itsuki: blue), bottom middle (Yuki: yellow), or bottom right (Kyon: red) and click on them. Why couldn't this be keyboard buttons (like Z, X, and C, respectively?!), I have no idea. The bomb is activated by a key press, why? If you want to activate your powerups, you have to click on Mikuru. So you'll be zipping back and forth between the bottom and top of the screen, which I think is just busy work.

There's Normal and Easy difficulty, but Normal was kicking me into a fetal ball within 5 minutes. Easy is much more enjoyable. While writing the first draft of this post, I was frustrated with my meager runs to the 6th stage. But I played again to get some screen shots, and somehow I improved. Along the way there were some Gradius-like bosses (what's the name of that iconic, first level boss in Gradius V? there's of copy ot that one here) and even some Space Invader homages. That's sweet. The above score was from a 35 minute run, finally ending on the 12th stage (the darn boss did me in). I reaped a 1,018,800, big woop.

This doesn't have much lasting power on me, but I want to see all the backgrounds and Mikuru bombs, heh. Now that I actually know about the "Continue" option, I'm going to keep trying it.

BTW, Mount Punch has 6 other anime or gal-get based action games. The only one that I knew about and saw in the shops was the Ruri Shot which is based on the 2003 gal-get PS2 game True Love Story: Summer Days, and yet.... I would like to try the others including the Card Captor Sakura-based one, heh.