Indeed, the original arcade flyer asks something along the lines of “do you like plump sisters?” in Japanese, with an off-screen respondent giving a thoroughly enthusiastic “YES!!” in reply, making the angle Cave was going for pretty clear. Its distinctive “chubby girl” look was the work of artist Kazuhiko Kawasaki - who has a penchant for drawing girls on the larger side - and certainly gives the game a very clear sense of its own identity. Interestingly, despite its strong shmup pedigree, Muchi Muchi Pork wasn’t particularly well-received on its original release, being a bit too easy for hardcore shmup fans and seemingly less universally appealing in its aesthetic than many of Cave’s other titles, particularly the otaku-baiting goth loli stylings of Deathsmiles. Expert players will still want to keep an eye on their rank, however it’s no good having lots of things to shoot if it’s impossible to survive more than a few seconds without being made into crispy fried bacon-girl! The rank system is back in Muchi Muchi Pork, though it’s more explicit in that it actually appears as a meter on the screen rather than all happening behind the scenes as in Battle Garegga, and is also rather more forgiving. This led to the curious situation of expert players deliberately losing lives at particular points in the game in order to manage the rank system effectively, balancing the difficulty level with the potential to attain high scores.
Yagawa’s most well-known work Battle Garegga for Raizing became notorious for its rather brutal dynamic difficulty “rank” system, which made the game more difficult the better you were doing, but calmed things down a bit if you died. And paying proper attention to these scoring mechanics can make a huge difference to your score, even if you barely make it out of the first stage, so it’s really worth your while to understand them.įor hardcore shoot ’em up fans, Muchi Muchi Pork is noteworthy for being the work of Shinobu Yagawa, lead designer on a number of influential titles that helped to define the “manic shooter” subgenre Cave became known for. Simple, right? Well, maybe not - this is still a Cave game, after all - but it’s certainly a bit more straightforward to understand than something like, say, Deathsmiles’ incredibly convoluted mechanics. Collecting scoring medals without letting any fall of the screen increases the value of the next batch, and stopping firing for a moment causes on-screen bullets to get sucked in towards you. Each of the three girls feature different shot patterns and arrangements of the Lard Beam as well as bombs that work a little differently from your average shmup rather than simply clearing the screen, they fire out a companion character that shoots from a fixed location on the screen for a few seconds while providing a brief moment of temporary invincibility.ĭestroying enemies with the normal shot drops pigs that fill up the Lard gauge, but destroying enemies with the Lard Beam turns them into scoring medals.
Like many other Cave shoot ’em ups, attaining high scores is dependent on understanding how and why to use your different shot types - in this case, a standard upgradeable bullet attack, and a “Lard Beam”, which is much more powerful but limited by a gauge at the bottom of the screen. Its scoring system is also reasonably straightforward to understand, though in typical Cave fashion it’s by no means as straightforward as simply “destroy everything and don’t die” as in something like Qute’s Eschatos. Muchi Muchi Pork is actually one of Cave’s more accessible shoot ’em ups for a number of reasons, most notably the wide range of selectable difficulty levels and the dynamic rank system that scales up and down according to your performance. Yes, we’re well and truly in cute ’em up territory here this is indeed a game featuring chubby young girls riding flying bicycles and collecting parachuting pigs, but don’t be fooled we’re also very firmly in danmaku land, too, with swarms of enemies and challenging bullet patterns to learn and navigate as you progress through the levels. It’s up to you to take to the skies on your flying pedal-bike and blast your way through Porkfillet’s forces and take on the nefarious villain himself. In Muchi Muchi Pork, you take on the role of one of three young girls who have been transformed into pig-girls by the antagonist General Porkfillet.
Muchi Muchi Pork very much falls into this latter category.
But others are largely unknown for one reason or another.
#SHMUP GAMER LINGO SERIES#
Some of their series - such as DoDonPachi, Espgaluda and Deathsmiles- managed to attain mainstream appeal, or at least the closest thing an arcade-style shmup can get to “mainstream appeal” in this modern age. Although rather less active than it once was, Cave was once an extremely prolific producer of some highly varied and creative shoot ’em ups.
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