This year, Alfa System had made a comeback with a new shmup on Switch as part of celebrating the company's 30th anniversary. The game is a whole lot like Castle of Shikigami series but with some differences. Firstly, the bosses are actually other playable characters including the man the main characters are competing for. Secondly, there doesn't seem to be 2-player support along with other modern presentation features like online leaderboards. Third, the characters are on the ground like Cave's Guwange and some NES Hudson Soft shmup where you can move around on the ground and jump on the platform. Lastly, there's no voice acting whatsoever. So, the presentation is akin to an indie computer game or perhaps an arcade game of the early 2000s.
Story concept-wise the 5 playable characters are competing for a man for some reason like date for instance. It may have been suited for fighting games but then, the stages are not in random order no matter which character you play as and the final boss takes place in the final stage as well. The second flaw is the lack of voice acting, online leaderboard and 2-player support. At least, you can switch to Vertical Mode and customize the controls unlike the Zerodiv ports of Psikyo games on Switch where there doesn't seem to be a way to customize the controls. Third flaw is how the explosions are programmed improperly like they tend to disappear out of the blue over whichever character you're playing as along with the shots you're using at the enemies.
One thing to remember is that when it comes to a fighting game about
fighters competing for a love interest, the tournament is assumed to be a
trap. You're already better off finding girlfriend/boyfriend the other
way but what if multiple people have the same interest as you in that
particular person? Also, the game's subtitle is quite wacky at best and who knows if that man is either the crush of those 5 sisters or maybe their brother? Things went on for like 1000 years according to the game's story and the game's ending takes place a year later but again, I can barely read the story so I barely know what's going on. Lastly, this isn't like the other games that have the word, Battle Royale in the game's title. The game could make more sense as a game of other game genre but shmup though, maybe a versus shmup may make closer sense like SNK's Twinkle Star Sprites.
As of this writing, the game was recently released in Japan digitally on Switch like last week or something. It's been a long time since the third Castle of Shikigami game and there was like no momentum whatsoever for the series sometime after the third game and the recent releases of the original Castle of Shikigami on IOS & Steam regained the momentum like a little bit as that time, people were already into other modern shmup games, like Cave shmup games ported to consoles, mobile and Steam, Crimzon Clover which is one badass Cave-style indie game which can be bought on GOG and Steam, Raiden V and Caladrius by Moss and of course other indie shmup games that have the professional game platform releases like Exception, Trouble Witches, Resogun, Super Stardust, etc.
Like Success Corporation, Alfa System worked on other games that have more momentum although Success went in a different direction with a bunch of HTML5 web browser games ranging from casual games to games with similar replay value as modern mobile games.
