Ketsui


Ketsui has been my longest and most arduous shmup undertaking so far. I’m writing after having finally attained the 1-ALL, which, all in all, took me the better part of 9 months. There’s been a lot of thoughts floating around in my head about this game and what it meant to try and achieve one goal for that amount of time, so it’s time to write them all down again.

I’ve tried to play Ketsui properly a couple of times before, but neither of them really went anywhere. I mentioned in On Shmuppin’ 1 that I’d initially tried Ketsui back in 2013 or 2014 as a mere five-minute-long curiosity, and that I also tried it in 2022 when I wanted it to be the first “real” arcade shmup that I was gonna clear, dropping it when I realised it was way above my pay grade. After then playing and succeeding with Espgaluda 1 & 2, it seemed like it was a good time to tackle Ketsui. October 2023 was the beginning of my Ketsui odyssey. I approached it much like I did Espgaluda 2, utilising the “draw some boxes and fill ‘em in” technique I adapted from Sterny’s Painless Progress Method, except instead of making my own savestates, I started off using the Arcade Challenge mode present in the Deathtiny PS4 port. This was going to be the main way I’d learn the game.

Arcade Challenge is a mode which is intended to provide a way for players to learn and master the game by earning medals & points by clearing sections of each stage with progressively harder difficulty. You start at the beginning of the section and you’re graded on your performance: not dying and not using any bombs (no miss no bomb, or NMNB) awards you a gold medal, not dying (no missing) but using bombs awards you a silver medal, and just beating the section, deaths and all, awards you a bronze medal. You can select the difficulty of each section too, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is very easy and 10 is the default arcade difficulty. Bullet count & pattern density increases as the difficulty ramps up, which I suppose is intended to ease you into the “real thing” by the end. Additionally, whilst playing each section, if you die, it rewinds 5 or 10 seconds before resuming to let you fix your mistake before pressing onward.

I initially thought this mode was ingenious and extremely useful for learning, and it was certainly created with a lot of thought and care. Where I ultimately found it most useful was closer to the start of my time with the game, where I needed the most help in acclimatizing to its aggressive nature. However, once that first hurdle was surmounted, with the benefit of hindsight, I think I still prefer the old method of making savestates and drawing boxes. My first reason is simple: the rewind feature sucks. If you die too much, rewinding every single time, the gameplay flow is so utterly broken and interrupted that you cannot grasp any of the intended temporal continuity; you’re basically grinding a two-second long section of the game on repeat, which accelerates burnout and doesn’t lead to any new insight. This is why I basically learned nothing from doing Stage 5 in Arcade Challenge. Even if you don’t die that much, I don’t think having an extra five seconds to figure out what went wrong and then attempt to fix it doesn’t really teach much, either; playing poorly and being forced into a corner usually happens because of subpar routing, which is impossible to identify on such a constricting timescale. You don’t get the full picture. My second reason is because Arcade Challenge incentivizes NMNBing via gold medals, and this is probably just a personal thing, once I actually started playing the game, it felt like anything less than a NMNB was unacceptable. This is just unreasonable for a newcomer to the game like myself; bombing was a vital strategy to ensure survival, and not doing so may as well have been suicide. Of course, it’s a no-brainer why Arcade Challenge was designed this way. Ketsui wants you to NMNB to even stand a chance at scoring well, as well as being part of the requirements to enter the second loops. I’ll talk more about this later, but for my purposes of simply clearing the game, Arcade Challenge wasn’t enough.

A picture of the practice boxes I drew for Ketsui. Rows are drawn for each section of the game, and columns are drawn for the number of attempts. A black 'X' is drawn in the box if I just beat it no matter what, an orange 'X' is drawn if I didn't die, and an orange star is drawn if I didn't bomb nor die.

My practice grid for Ketsui. I ended up practicing way, way more than this.

I made savestates in Arcade mode for my own use. One at the start of a stage, one at the midboss, one after the midboss, one at the boss, and then at any other tough sections that needed specific attention. This way, the “flow” of the game is maintained and I can play whole sections at a time, rather than tiny, contextless blips of action in isolation. Ketsui is pretty relentless and there’s barely any downtime, so a route is definitely necessary for success. You gotta learn what enemies appear, when they appear, what their bullets patterns are like, what weapon to use on them, whether to score or to speedkill ‘em, and then repeat this for the next enemy encounter. Essentially, you need to keep up the pace with the game, and savestate practice (using big sections like these) really helped formulate a route and etch it into my mind. I had a plan for most of the individual moment-to-moment encounters, and by around the time I got the 1-ALL I would be able to recall these encounters, my strategy for them, what an ideal version looks like, what a bad version looks like, and then finally, in the moment, be able to discern if I was succeeding or if I needed to bomb. I hate to say the “m-word” but Ketsui’s sheer difficulty really did require more memorization and practice than the other shmups I’d played before it. There was very little room for error.

Progress was slow. I practiced the game so much and I drew many, many boxes. I got a lot of practice in, to a fault - I noticed at some point I, embarrassingly, started using practice mode as a crutch, like I was procrastinating from playing the game for real. Like Espgaluda 2 I wrote down all my 1-ALL attempts and in retrospect it’s kind of crazy to see how slowly I was making it through the game. So, so often I would just spiral out of control and die in, like, stage 3 or something. The game’s aggression and intensity made my play sessions short, and since I spent most of my time with the game after work (I work full time), I didn’t have much brain power left to expend - I could play maybe 60 to 80 minutes before I was fried. It’s also extremely easy to die to random stuff you didn’t see or expect in a game like Ketsui, which was aggravating to say the least. Things could go so wrong, so quickly. Across late April and early-to-mid May I started to hit a wall where I was repeatedly dying in stage 1 and resetting, getting maybe one good run per play session. It usually wasn’t a great run anyway, riddled with deaths and mistakes, but at least it wasn’t yet another reset in stage 1, right? I mentioned somewhere in a previous post that “I think I’m currently in a good place in my life where stuff like this doesn’t get to me.” Well, dear reader, it did get to me. I reached the tipping point and suddenly became very disillusioned with Ketsui. I started to hate the game, wondering why I was pointlessly toiling away at a game, my stupid infatuation with some nerd weeb hobby, incessant grinding leading to no results, even doubting what the point of playing shmups even was. I started to hate the fact I’d been interested in them, hating that I told others they were my main “thing”, and started thinking I was only doing it for the approval of others, like it was just another hyperfixation, just another phase. I stopped playing and called it quits. It’s only now I realise I sorely needed a break.

In On Shmuppin 1 I shared my espousal of Sterny’s Painless Progress Method, or, the “draw some boxes” technique. I seemingly missed the other, massive part of the method, which is to have two shmups you wanna play: one is your main game (intense/difficult/big goals), and then a side game (relaxing/fun). He says you’re supposed to play the main game for one week, then the side game the next week; to not touch Game B during Week A and vice versa. I did not do this at all. I wasn’t playing any other shmup, let alone any other GAME for this whole time. It’s no wonder I burned out. I really was just grinding away at Ketsui until my blade went dull and I was dumbfounded as to why it couldn’t slice like it used to.

I eventually returned to the game. Three weeks later after I’d given up “for good”, a youtuber I like posted their commentated 1-ALL of the game with Panzer, which was surprising, since I think their video might be the first Panzer commentary on youtube. I started feeling better about the game, remembering just how cool I think it is, and realising that I really do play these games for myself in the end. I also used some of their strategies in some particularly scary parts in stage 5. Before the imminent burnout I was feeling like I must play Ketsui, like I was clocking on to another job. I can talk all day about “consistency” and whatever but there is a difference between happily, wholeheartedly wanting to play and reluctantly, tiredly grinding, even if in both scenarios you’re still playing daily. There’s a fine line between the two especially when trying to achieve a big goal like this, and, really, a grind is unavoidable; you have to learn to love it. I underestimated the value of taking breaks, and going forward this is not a mistake I’ll repeat. If it starts to suck, I’m just gonna take a break. The game isn’t going anywhere, and I’m probably not going anywhere either. Hell, me burning out on Ketsui meant I picked a random unplayed, non-shmup game in my steam library to finally try, and I ended up loving it.

Taking a break resulted in some of my best performance to date. Literally the very first run I did after coming back to the game, I made it all the way to Evaccaneer, the game’s final boss, for the first time. I wasn’t resetting nearly as much and my runs were actually going places. This was a very good feeling, and on reflection it actually felt like I was making progress. I’ve only really learned now about the importance of taking breaks and resting. I didn’t do this for Espgaluda 1 and 2 probably because I didn’t need to; those games are, honestly, much less intense than Ketsui. I knew not to make my play sessions too long because once your brain is fried, you don’t retain new information and your performance will suffer, but I only thought this happened during a 24-hour period, where sleeping or coming back the next day would re-energize me enough. I did not foresee that the period of my downward spiral took weeks for me to really hit rock bottom, and that I needed to change my perspective about playing these games to come back healthier.

The break was absolutely necessary, but it wasn’t a magical cure-all. The game could, obviously, still be frustrating. I even ragequit a few times. I don’t think I can accurately state just how hard Ketsui pushed me. Sometimes it felt like my progress was on such a microscopic scale it was like water eroding stone: steady and continuous, but imperceptible. I did not have the same experience with Espgaluda 1 and 2 at all, and I think the reason is because, in those games, if you sense that something is going wrong, you can use Kakusei to get out of the scary situation… mostly. In Ketsui, your only safety net is your bombs, and they are much less plentiful than the green gems needed for Kakusei in the Espgaluda series. The margin for error is much smaller and the need for tighter performance was higher. I was really deep in the weeds now. But, the sentiment wasn’t of despair or frustration; these setbacks were minor and simply felt natural, encountered during any pursuit of a goal like this. I was getting further and further into the game, anyway. It was good to remember that I was now surpassing previous personal bests quite easily, and that what was once a huge achievement (e.g. reaching the stage 4 boss) was now just a normal, mundane thing, and that I was aiming higher. I think going forward another useful strategy will be to reflect on every single play session, and write down something positive that happened. Anything. Any new insight, any new ideas, any success. That way, I’ll have something tangible with which to remind myself that I’m not doing this for naught, that progress is happening, and looking back at it once the clear is attained would be awesome.

I reached Evaccaneer for a second time, and I had the worst heartbreak I’ve ever experienced in a shmup so far: I game overed when he had 2% HP left. If I had survived for less than one second more, I would’ve won. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was about to pop, and I, uh, literally screamed “NOOOOOOO!!!”. I even had a bomb left in stock, adding insult to injury… I felt sick afterwards. I didn’t use the bomb because I’d been playing with a subconscious thought telling me to not bomb if I can help it throughout stage 5, seeing as I wanted to maximize my resources and use them where it counted, but nobody told the voice in the back of my head to just repeatedly bomb Evaccaneer if you’re in his final phase and you have bombs left in stock. I sat there in shock for about an hour before I turned off the game. As much as this hurt, it didn’t dissuade me from persisting. It only took me a few days more before I was able to finally clear the game, and let me tell you, I did not hesitate this time: once I realised I had enough lives and bombs left to finish the fight easily, this time, I just carpet bombed the shit out of Evaccaneer. He went down, and with that, I finally claimed my 1-ALL. It took me 193 attempts over 90 hours. Some stats:

First time reaching…

I felt absolutely LOCKED IN during my fateful 193rd attempt. Even if I didn’t literally play perfectly (that is way beyond my scope of comprehension), I felt like my shmup instincts were taking over and that I was bringing my best performance ever. Stage 1 through 4 basically went absolutely perfectly, and in this run I lived the longest I ever had, ending with my first death during the stage 4 boss. That was my best ever pace. I managed stage 5 well enough and dealt with Evaccaneer decently, enough to finally put him down, and that’s good enough for me. Echoing my experience with Espgaluda 2, it’s only now that I’ve cleared the game that I feel like I’m beginning to get it. Again, I basically scraped by the finish line, tired, bruised, and bloodied, but with the beginnings of knowledge. I want to clear the game with Tiger eventually, which is where I think I’ll probably have a better advantage. I’d spent so much time with the game that now I realise I’d actually come a long way; it feels like the days of game overing in stage 2 were a lifetime ago.

It was also only around the time I attained the 1-ALL that I finally began to grasp the idea of using all my bombs before being “allowed” to die, since it meant I’d best utilised my resources. This is something I’d heard time and time again from other players, but I didn’t know what it meant til I played Ketsui. I guess the hardest part was navigating the spectrum between Reactive Bombing and Planned Bombing, deciding when I would allow myself to bomb, what patterns/enemies were too much trouble and that I’d just bomb them, and how, if at all possible, I would ration my bombs to allow for emergencies. There’s no simple guide to follow and it was entirely my responsibility to tailor my “bomb plan” to suit my skill level, adjusting it on the fly as was required. I could extrapolate at length another thought here, one I’ve alluded to earlier in the post, about how Ketsui has been designed to disincentivize bombing and how this is really the responsibility of the game’s director, Tsuneki Ikeda, and how this ideology is present in several of his other titles for CAVE. Bombing only for emergencies raises the stakes and definitely increases drama and tension, which I genuinely do appreciate when considering Ketsui as an art object (and not just “entertainment”, or, to be more cynical, “content”), but it definitely did wear down on me at some point. It’s why I want whatever game I play next to not be so Ikeda-esque, one where it doesn’t feel like a death in stage 3 is the equivalent to a game over. I don’t think a “bomb plan” is necessary for games that aren’t directed by Ikeda, or games made in his style. We’ll see. As much as I genuinely enjoy games in his style, I need to experience more of what this genre has to offer instead of 4 games directed by the same guy for the same company.

My basic strategy for getting the 1-UP in Stage 5. I still don't like it.

Another thing I would like to improve upon in the future is reflecting upon my route or strategies. I don’t think I did that enough during this whole ordeal. The thought that I may have been needlessly grinding away at a strategy that was simply ineffective, or bad, is disturbing. It’s hard to tell if a strategy doesn’t work because of a lack of skill, or because the strategy itself is bad, and I don’t really know how to resolve this. For every roadblock I faced I certainly could’ve tried a different approach once I was unable to make it work after several attempts, but again, it’s hard to tell if it would ever have worked, or not. A particular example of this is when the Panzer clone spawns in Area 1 of Stage 5, the place where you can get the hidden 1-UP. My strategy involved locking on to the Defender on the left, and then very slowly tapping to the right to kill the Panzer clone and all the zako tanks; this works, but the Panzer clone’s curving blue bullets can easily trap you against the right wall and you die. I am certain there’s a better strategy here. I actually tried learning a different one, but I couldn’t make it work, so back to the weird sort-of-okay strategy I went. In the future I definitely need to pinpoint these problem areas more and work on them, because sometimes it felt like I was relying on getting lucky to succeed. Obviously a bit of luck is necessary since I’m not a machine, but having a low success rate for any strategy is also unacceptable.

I love Ketsui. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. I love the art direction, the characters, the music, the story, and it’s all tied together with extremely tight gameplay. It feels so good to speedkill stuff in this game. It feels so good to get right up in an enemy’s face and explode them into a shower of 5-chips and hearing their twinkly sound effects ring out. As much as this game beat me into the ground, I can’t deny that it’s pretty special. I’ve been wanting to beat it since 2022 where I tried to make it my first “real” shmup project as a brand new noob to the genre, and it feels great to have finally achieved that goal. It’s no wonder why it keeps getting heralded as one of the best in the genre, an absolute stone cold classic. I’ve spent so much time with it that I noticed a strange feeling once I had cleared the game. It felt like Ketsui was gone, and I’d returned to my normal life before it. Playing it almost daily and then suddenly having achieved my goal, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to not play it. This reminds me of what I was talking about at the end of my previous post On Shmuppin’ 1, and now I know I could just return to it whenever I want. It feels like now that I’ve finally cleared the game, I can enjoy it for what it is, and just have fun with it. It’s also nice to know that I’m probably capable of clearing it again, especially considering that after my first time beating Espgaluda 2 I would go on to clear it an additional four times. I don’t know what game I’m gonna play next, or even what I’ll write about, but right now it feels like I can take on any challenge this genre has to offer. Well, most challenges…