#6 - April 2025 - Qute STGs (Ginga Force, Natsuki Chronicles, Eschatos)
SHMUPs--or STGs, whichever you prefer to call them--are a genre of games that holds a particular amount of romance for me. Tearing through the skies, soaring through space at high speeds, sometimes you're controlling a ship, sometimes you're controlling a girl with a big hat or particular hair accessory, oftentimes you have a deceptively tiny hitbox, possessing more firepower than God that you'll need every bit of to deal with the dozens and hundreds of enemies in your way. They're beautiful and exciting and just exude raw energy. In so many of them, this is all accompanied by some of the best soundtracks out there.
And I'm not very good at them. That doesn't matter. Chasing that high is good enough, honestly.
Here, I'll be running through a few STGs I've played from the developer Qute--a company that oddly enough also handles health care related software--alongside one special non-Qute STG mention at the end. I enjoyed them all greatly, although for differing reasons, and I'd happily suggest any of them to someone who was interested in picking up a new STG depending on what their specific preferences were.
I'll be presenting these not chronologically, but instead in the order I've played them since it partially informed my own feelings on them. I'll be including a few self-indulgent links to their music too, since it's all really good!
Ginga Force is the first part of the two Seventia games along with Natsuki Chronicles. It originally came out in 2013 on consoles, and ended up with a Steam port in 2020. It occasionally goes on incredibly steep sales for $1 USD, as does Natsuki Chronicles.
For those interested in a more straightforward arcade experience, Ginga Force is likely not it. It instead has more of a campaign where you pick individual levels to do, can re-visit older ones at any time, and outside of an early set of stages you can do in any order, each stage unlocks the next one up through the final boss. There is no arcade mode at all, but there are per-stage scores and ranks you can chase.
Ginga Force follows Alex Heatburn and Margaret Whitetail, two members of the Mitsurugi Security Service--a security firm that works to defend the law and order on the newly terraformed planet of Seventia, one of many new homes for humanity and also a planet rich in a brand new material called septonium. This also makes it a hotbed for all sorts of folks looking to start their own criminal enterprises and turn a huge profit. The story is pretty straightforward with quite a bit of mid-mission dialogue--if you can't understand Japanese it can be a bit rough to try to read the subtitles while playing the game--but at the end of the day, a lot of the early stages involve chasing down the criminal of the week, shooting your way through hordes of enemies, fighting the criminal in a boss battle, and moving on.
Ginga Force is a bit like Tyrian, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, UN Squadron, or Jets'n'Guns compared to a lot of other pure arcade STGs. You earn credits between stages--and yes, you can farm them from old stages whenever you want--and can spend them on new weapons, sub-weapons, special weapons, engines (with variable speed settings), paint schemes, or extra parts that can add bonus lives or may help deal with stage-specific gimmicks. Note that most of this is unlocked via stage progress, so you can't grind your way into buying weapons better than what you should have. More importantly, Ginga Force tends to unlock things right as you get to a stage where they might be useful, so oftentimes you don't need to fuss too much over wasting credits if you just go by off of what's new in the store.
What captivated me about Ginga Force is the stage design where so much of it feels like there's something extra constantly going on. The intro stage is effectively a high-speed chase through the city streets, with the criminal of the week's ship sometimes crashing through traffic, sending cars flying into you that you have to quickly veer off to the side and dodge, complete with giant WARNING text appearing on-screen. Stage two features you chasing down a super hacker who's running away with sensitive data and has turned the facility's security systems against you, causing you to have to both fight back against the waves of enemies being thrown at you while avoiding spotlights and alarm drones--you can even shoot the alarm drones (but not too much or you'll break them!) to give them enough of a jolt to reclaim them and use them against the boss. Stage five features out of control mining machines and runaway minecarts carrying loads of septonium out of the mine--but shooting specific control carts instantly stops the remainder of the minecarts from shooting at you (why can they shoot at you..?!), gives a load of bonus points, and a nice sense of accomplishment.
The big capstone moment that sold Ginga Force as not just pretty good but great for me was stage 7, where the main characters finally learn about a big conspiracy going on that implicates the current leadership of Seventia in some extremely bad stuff and go rogue, rushing off into space via a space elevator to go investigate a certain lead. It abandons the occasionally slightly more gimmicky stage design with side objectives and turns into a pure STG, blasting through a countless number of Mitsurugi Security Service ships and even entire weapons platforms that are being sent down along the rails of the space elevator to stop you, all to the tune of one of the coolest damn tracks in the game, Gallant Gunshot, and culminating in a showdown with the protagonist of the next game, Natsuki, a member of Seventia's Rapid Defense Force and former classmate of Margaret, your co-pilot. It's simply great.
I liked Ginga Force a lot! The constant high energy of the stage designs, Yousuke Yasui's incredible work on the soundtrack, and it's fairly casual friendly since the more you fail within a given stage, the more extra lives you earn for that specific stage, so by some combination of learning via repetition and acquiring more lives even a casual player can make it through the game.
Most importantly, the final boss of the game has a screaming match with Alex where they both get so fired up that they just begin incoherently yelling at each other, which is both incredibly funny and so hot-blooded that it's hard to not love it despite the fight's difficulty. Poor Margaret, having to sit in the co-pilot seat listening to all of that...
Natsuki Chronicles is the other half of the Seventia games. It came out in 2019, and hit PCs in 2021 (as a reminder, Ginga Force was 2013 and 2020, respectively). It borrows a lot of design elements from Ginga Force, although notably, it's a horizontal shooter instead of vertical.
This time it follows the titular Natsuki, and actually starts off showing her viewpoint after the big fight with her in stage 7 of Ginga Force, before going back in time to when she was a newbie in planet Seventia's Rapid Defense Force. The first few stages are some of the early missions she got sent on dealing with supposed dissidents and other people deemed problematic--unlike Ginga Force where you're mostly capturing criminals to take them in, Natsuki's commanding officer is more of the "eh, yeah, just kill them" type. If Ginga Force didn't make it obvious, the people in charge of Seventia and its security are not the greatest.
Natsuki Chronicle's design is... a bit weirder, compared to Ginga Force. You can still grind credits. You can still unlock new weapons and sub-weapons and such. However, the more tightly paced unlocks from Ginga Force are completely gone. Instead of most weapons just having 1-2 different iterations (think like a level 1 and level 2 laser where the level 2 may just be slightly wider and more damaging), NC has a ton of weapons that frequently have 4+ levels with rapidly increasing costs.
You don't need the highest level weapons to beat the game on normal mode, and for the most part, there's still a consistent pacing where just doing stages unlocks new weapons to buy. But! You now have an overall player level that rises as you attempt stages, and some higher level weapons can unlock with a higher player level. Note that just like Ginga Force, you sort of get more lives by repeatedly attempting and failing a stage--it's a little different here since in Natsuki Chronicles you have shields that can regenerate over time, so instead of EX Lives, you get EX Shields that just block one shot and don't regenerate--either way repeated failing gives you effectively more leeway on a stage, but can now also lead into unlocking weapons way out of depth for what you're expected to have at that point in the game. I think the EX Lives/EX Shields system is perfectly good (and can be disabled if you don't like it!), but I'm a lot iffier on potentially getting disproportionately stronger weapons because you failed a stage too much, or even went back to re-do older ones too much, and your player level kept going up.
Incidentally, I may have unlocked a particular gun so strong I skipped an entire phase on the last boss by just damaging him too fast, so... I might be biased about why it's a bad idea.
But Natsuki Chronicles is still a fun enough game. Compared to Ginga Force, Natsuki Chronicles adds some options to your ship that can be used to both block shots or even be launched aggressively at enemies, and besides that there's other variations in main/sub weapon types that don't appear in Ginga Force. This, combined with Natsuki being a horizontal game instead of vertical helps make the game stand out more on its own.
Since I talked about it earlier in the Ginga Force section--Natsuki Chronicles does feature the other half of the showdown with Alex/Margaret from Ginga Force, even going so far as to let you briefly control the same boss-class ship that Natsuki had back in Ginga Force, and featuring an arrangement of Ginga Force's boss theme!
Of course, the events still follow what's canon to Ginga Force. It's a boss fight where "winning" still means Natsuki loses, but in turn gets tipped off that Alex and Margaret went rogue for a very good reason--namely, the much lauded Magni Corporation currently overseeing Seventia's development is rotten to the core. The Earth Federation had a special AI named Specia set up on Seventia to help monitor the planet and also keep a check on the Magni Corporation's power, only for the Magni Corporation to seal her away and replace her with an evil twin named Despecia. And so, Natsuki realizes it's too late for her to catch up and help Alex and Margaret, but there's still one thing left she can do. She grabs an abandoned fighter, and proceeds to wage a one-woman war on Seventia's corrupt military, hoping to draw enough heat that Alex and Margaret can go save the real Specia, and in turn save planet Seventia. And the music for the stage that kicks all this off? It's Gallant Gunshot, newly arranged for Natsuki Chronicles.
I will regretfully say the last boss for Natsuki Chronicles isn't as hype as Ginga Force--while her former commander does get enraged and start yelling incoherently at Natsuki just like the last boss of Ginga Force, Natsuki isn't hot-blooded enough to return the favor.
Overall, I'd say it was a okay game. The soundtrack, again worked on by Yousuke Yasui, still rules. The stages tend to be more straightforward with much less of a focus on unique side objectives or hooks, although there are some gimmicks occasionally. I just really don't like each weapon having so many levels that are frequently tied to your player level rather than game progress, since it makes the balance feel so much mushier. But it was still worth playing and I had fun with it.
All of this brings us to Eschatos, which came out originally in Japan in 2011, and later saw releases on Steam in 2015 and later console ports in 2022. Of the three Qute titles I played, this is the oldest.
It is also my favorite of them.
Unlike Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles which both have shop mechanics and an actual story mode you progress through, Eschatos is a pure arcade game. Your ship has two weapons and a shield period, the only modes are Original (a normal STG where you progress the game throughout 26 "areas" or mini-stages), Advanced (which is Original with more mechanics, but the same stage progression), and Time Attack, which is a timed mode where dying takes away time and each area cleared gives you more time with which to try to clear the whole game. There's difficulty modes too--normal is reasonable and with a slight bit of practice I thought it was no problem to get through.
Eschatos captured my heart for almost the opposite reasons Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles did. Gone is a lot of the mid-stage dialogue which was admittedly really hard to focus on, gone are the considerations of having to hem and haw over which weapons to buy, and while I ultimately appreciated it due to stumbling badly on some stages, gone are the copious amounts of EX Lives and EX Shields to help me stumble my way past a stage, never quite sure if I really learned how to get good or not. (Eschatos does offer extra continues or even lives over time, although your leaderboard scores are not counted if you change the life count, and only reflect your score up until you continue)
Eschatos is instead about pure arcade thrills divided across 26 areas, occasionally punctuated by boss fights. Your ship has a low-range wide shot, a front shot that is fairly narrow but reaches across the screen, and then a shield that recharges over time when not in use, but can block attacks and can also be used offensively, dealing significant damage if you're willing to ram yourself into enemies which actually added an really fun angle to the game once I realized it by accidentally finishing off a boss with it when I was panicking. Of course, if you use it like that, then you do need to be mindful that the shield does occasionally need time to recharge.
Eschatos is just fun. It's got a snappy pace, there's plenty of popcorn enemies that, due to the scoring rewarding you for quickly killing waves, actively incentivizes you to start learning enemy spawn patterns to be set up to mow them down as fast as possible. It also incentivizes proper use of both your wide and front shots, as many enemies have spawn patterns that are much easier to deal with quickly using the wide shot. And while it does have mean bullet patterns sometimes, again, you have a shield that helps get you through tough spots and its recharge time isn't so slow that deploying it to get through a particularly tricky pattern suddenly means you'll have to get by without it for the next minute or two.
But by far one of the most important things is, just like Ginga Force and Natsuki Chronicles, Eschatos has a ridiculously good soundtrack. The Steam version even has both the original version and a newly arranged one--I prefer the original personally, but this is really just like being offered 2 delicious cakes as far as I'm concerned. As usual, Yousuke Yasui is responsible for these bangers.
Hellsinker!! This is the special guest I mentioned earlier. It's a ludicrously excellent STG that, although it came out in Steam back in 2019 via the developer Ruminant's Whimper, has effectively been in the works since 2004 from its earliest trial version. It's been iterated upon constantly since then, and the current release is a marvel in all respects between game design, writing, and music. The first time I finished Segment 4 and there was a brief VN bit before the next stage began, and that there was even more narration going on after the following stages, was both completely unexpected and ridiculously cool after the first few stages just progressed normally from one to the next. ... And, admittedly, it's somewhat easier to handle than, say, Ginga Force/Natsuki Chronicle's style of mid-stage dialogue playing over the game.
I'm going to keep my comments brief here because this post got a little longer than intended, and also I haven't even finished a full run of Hellsinker (it's hard, okay... don't laugh at me... I've only been to segment 6 but I've only done a couple of runs in total...).
Hellsinker leans more towards the bullet hell side of things compared to the previous titles here, with a meaty amount of mechanical depth and 4 Executors (playable characters) that all handle very differently. Deadliar has a fancy subweapon that can be freely aimed. One of Minogame's subweapons, when charged, can provide a small on-demand invincibility(!!) field. Kagura boasts multiple variations you can choose from with differing subweapons providing four play styles in one. Fossilmaiden... well, I haven't played them yet, honestly. They all handle differently enough, even down to bombing mechanics and how their primary shots work, that there's a real degree of intimacy going on with getting good at one character's kit.
I'll cut things short here to mention one last cool thing on Hellsinker--a copy of the manual available online that has a ton of detail on both the story and the mechanics and is just a fun read even if you have no interest in playing the game, found here. Take a look!! The lore is extremely cool and interesting!! (or don't! I'm not your boss!)