Revenge On X-Play! Castle of Shikigami Review

Revenge On X-Play! Castle of Shikigami Review. Long ago Castle of Shikigami (Mobile Light Force 2) received a 1/5 score on X-Play. What is interesting about this review is that even though X-Play were clearly a trash TV show with joke reviews, this score seems to have stuck to the game's reputation, at least on wikipedia. What I find particularly interesting about the X-Play review, is that the show never seemed the need to explain why the score was so low, other than the graphics, being "Japanese" and the notorious "lasting only 30 minutes." A lot of these critiques could, of course, apply the genre of shmups generally. I think it was a classic case of judging a game by its cover, due to the silly western Mobile Light Force 2 cover that seemed to by trying to trick the player into thinking they were buying an action game.
Overall, Shikigami is a very unique and interesting bullet-hell (danmaku) shmup. It is possibly the first shoot em' up to have a visible hitbox and it clearly was an inspiration for the Touhou series. What sets Shiki apart is it's aggressive grazing and speedkilling scoring system (outside of some crazy boss milking of course). The goal of today's review is to take a fair look at this game and point out what I think are it's strengths, and also it's weaknesses that I hope are improved upon in the later games in the series.
As of right now the game is available on Steam, but beware the steam port (while decent performance wise) does seem a bit buggy. Also it sadly doesn't have the delightful voice acting that we see in Shikigami 2. Shiki 1 is also available on PS2 under the title "Mobile Light Force 2."

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