ARE THESE JAPANESE INDIE BULLET HELL SHMUPS A SCAM?

Let's take a deep look at one of the strangest & prolific Japanese doujin bullet hell shmup developers Rayhawk Game World aka Layer Ray. If you've ever came across this game catalogue, please share your thoughts in the comments. Very weird games, lol.
Links to Rayhawk & Layer Ray games: hp.vector.co.j...
www.dlsite.com...
www.vector.co....
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[@boghogSTG]

LOL I was just thinking about RAYHAWK, unhinged outsider art type of shit. Something you'd see on a Fredrik Knudsen style channel in 20 years

[@desmaku87]

haha DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

[@boghogSTG]

@@desmaku87 the kusoge shmup spinoff - up the hole

[@DharmaPunkGames]

Appreciate you digging through these games and reporting back!

[@Crayfis]

For sure as @boghogSTG said, a quirky outsider artist with compulsive productivity. There was a similar guy who produced these insane action platformers with rendered figures, a bunch of them all using the same assets with just slight variation in theme. Like you said the visuals are pretty good period style recreations, but I somehow can't see this guy being involved in productive collaboration.. Great video, deffo one of the most interesting corners of indie shmup dev

[@StudioMudprints]

Wait, hold on, didn't I get one of these? I totally forgot about them until I saw some of the screenshots in the intro there.

[@FiRezfps]

Operations-wise reminds me to Akira Goya. Quality-wise that's another story

[@nellancaster]

Oh, _Rayhawk._ I actually saw _a lot_ of this circle's shmups being - apparently - top sellers in the STG section of the site. When I caved in and finally decided to try playing one of the more recent works... I bounced off them *hard.* Did not enjoy the visuals one bit, and this is coming from someone who can handle Cruelty Squad's garish visuals. To this day I just avoid their games, but it's interesting to see that Rayhawk's earlier works actually has a more tolerable artstyle, gameplay notwithstanding.

[@turtle_soda]

i get it!!! it's a commentary on shmups. his early stuff is based on 90's shmups which are fairly tame compared to today. as shmups evolved they've become more and more crazy/bullet hell in terms of visuals. rayhawk clearly is making fun of how the medium has changed over the years by showing how over exaggerated it is

[@frog-girl-68000]

this is definitely what i'm taking away from seeing it. it's hard to tell if it's done out of (self-deprecating/piss-taking) love for the genre or out of spite, but either way i'm kinda here for it. it seems like they're having fun making them at least!. at the price of about a credit or two in the arcade i absolutely would not feel "cheated" if i ever ended up checking a few of these out.

[@desmaku87]

yea could be !

[@ThatPunkYT]

Yo, great video. Some of these games really ARE hard to look at, holy cow. Y'know, there's a similar line of games on Steam that I've often wondered about being a scam or if the dev is just lazy, your video is inspiring me to maybe make one of my own at some point. Thanks for that! Also, didn't expect to see an Eternal Champions CD cameo in this flick haha.

[@desmaku87]

thanks for watchin !

[@twilightex]

these are the kamige we strive for..

[@desmaku87]

do you know much about this dev?

[@twilightex]

not at all man, I've never seen these. You're digging the precipitates now

[@nickelsharkstg]

What an interesting rabbit hole!

[@tomt55]

Have you checked out the older shmups on the 80s and 90s arcade emulators - Final Burn Legends, CoinOps and or MAME? I have these on my modded OG Xbox and modded Xbox 360, all these emulaters have loads of shmups. Seems like a lot of the Rayhawk shmups you were covering in this video are either incomplete and or messy.

[@kaishmuper]

great video the rabbithole of that dev goes sooooo deep

[@ezgetems1399]

So like... you said there was legit only one of his games that had a real hitbox? It looks like the games would be passable (apart from maybe some of the hyper trippy ones lol) if he literally just put a proper hitbox on the bullets. Or am I missing something here? These games don't seem to make much sense at all to me

[@frog-girl-68000]

honestly would rather play a few of these than Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe's Brother

[@zachabel805]

ZUN if he was a psychonaut instead of an alcohoolic

[@bobmcbob4399]

The English text reviews all have the same format. Each has one sentence per line. Fishy.

[@JuanRoosterbeard]

#notpewpew