Diadra Empty... what is going on?

(tags game, Windows, doujin, shmup)

Just today at Tora no Ana I bought this doujin shmup game called Diadra Empty (ディアドラエンプティ). It's made by a circle called frozenorb (ふろーずんおーぶ) and released back in 2008-06 in time for Comic Market 74. The package had some nice colorful graphics like this cover art. (this is not in game)

The back also showed some really cool danmaku bullets. Check out the sample game play video. There's an easy to read web page at doujinshop.com. For 1800 yen I gave it a spin. 

My old Sega Saturn style USB pad was ready from the get go. First off, this game plays like a modern style Defender, complete with a radar sub view and push button to lock shooting direction. Except there seems to be millions of bullets on the field. I don't understand what will kill my avatar though, because I seem to be able to bump through the whole danmaku barrage without a scratch. This has very lenient shields, which even regenerate automatically.

The background gradients are very pretty, but the foreground sprites don't make much sense. The enemy bullets are really colorful though. Lock on slow lasers chasing you around the screen, millions of dumb bullets flying around. The background scrolls independent from your avatar's movement, so I get confused easily. Frames per second isn't rock solid, at first with 60 FPS, but when the storm comes in, I barely get 15 FPS.

There is an RPG element to it, where you have to power up. Sadly the actually power up only occurs between stages. You have to collect coins, which means getting in close to the enemies to suck up their death release. I was able to collect 4 Gradius chase style Options.

I got up to level 8 which seems to be the last level because it was crazy long with crazy bosses. I couldn't beat the "emerald orb" which shot out some screen covering homing lasers. Crazy.

The music is really good though. It kinda reminds me of RayStorm.

Unfortunately it's really buggy. The game freezes without saving my progress. I am irate, because part of the game's powerups are unlocked as I proceed, supposedly. I checked out the web page and it seems I have to apply a patch. It's not very clear. Plus the patch adds two more EXE files, also unclear. The patch was password protected, wut.

I'll give it another try, because the patch finally allows me to go to the config screen without crashing (!). Perhaps it will unlock some more of the game's powerups. Heck I want to lend it to a friend so that I can compare experiences.