(This was originally posted on cohost, hence the lowercase)

i just managed to clear the first loop of sol divide, a 1997 arcade game by psikyo that's almost exactly halfway between a shoot em up and a beat em up. my opinion on the game has gone back and forth so many times over the course of clearing it that i'm not even sure how i feel about it anymore. i think i like it? either way, i'm fascinated by it.

what is it?

sol divide is like a shooting game, in the sense that you fly around in 8 directions and always face to the right and have a long-range attack that has infinite ammo and doesn't interrupt your movement. it's like a beat em up too, in the sense that you spend 90% of the game trying to lock down crowds of enemies using the hitstun from your melee attacks. you have a magic meter which you can spend on various spells that can deal damage, lock down enemies or give yourself invincibility frames.

its scoring system is extremely simple. you get 4x points for defeating enemies with the final hit of your 4-hit melee attack string, but your melee string gets interrupted whenever you take damage. so most of your score comes from getting bosses to low health then trying to find enough space to safely throw out a 4-hit melee string to finish them off. and that's all of the game's mechanics!

is it good?

sol divide doesn't seem to have the best reputation among shooting game players because it's a messy game where you have a huge hitbox, rely on hitstun more than dodging, and will quickly get cornered and beaten up if you try to sit back and shoot down the average group of enemies. i imagine that most beat em up players wouldn't love it either, because you don't get to knock crowds of enemies around in the same satisfying ways that beat em ups usually let you do. you can't grab enemies and throw them around, you can't launch them up into the air, and you can't send them flying across the screen.

that imaginary beat em up player's opinion is how i felt about the game myself while i was learning it, but once i accepted the game for what it was and started playing it on its own terms i had a much better time. it's not quite a beat em up, it's not quite a shoot em up, it's a game about flying up to crowds of enemies and trying to hit them with a big stick to stop them from attacking you.

even though i ended up enjoying the game for what it is, my favorite thing about it is that it highlights how good a combination of arcade shoot em ups and beat em ups could be. if you're interested in both genres, it's almost impossible to play this without daydreaming about ways that a game like this could take influence from other shooting games and beat em ups. maybe a game like this would still work if you could grab enemies, or if you could kick them around like in astro boy omega factor, or if you had other ways to stun enemies from further away, or if enemies tried to circle around you like in a beat em up, or if they could fill the screen with bullet patterns like a shoot em up, or any number of potential changes. it really feels to me like the definitive game in this subgenre is yet to exist, and whenever i think about this too much i get the urge to drop everything that i'm working on and try to make that game myself. i'll resist for now...

one last thing before i go: psikyo's pacing is ridiculous, even by arcade standards. this game somehow goes through 8 stages in 7 minutes. a psikyo developer mentioned in this 1997 interview (thanks shmuplations) that they kept shortening the length of their arcade games' stages so they could let players experience lots of variety in just a few minutes, and frankly i'm shocked at how well this strategy works on me. it really did feel like i experienced an entire full-length arcade game in just 7 minutes, even though the stages were so short that it was practically a boss rush and most of the bosses didn't take long to fight either.