Chaos Field
By Francesco-Alessio Ursini / March 28, 2009
A BRIEF INTRO
Chaos Field is not an "original" game: it basically takes many elements from various other shooters and puts them together. This is typical, after all, of doujin games, and by no means a bad thing, mind you. Some sources of inspiration are obvious (RSG and Ikaruga), others a bit more obscure (a few Taito games, Soukyugurentai). This is MileStone's first game, and reminds me of another company that started out by making a sort of "homage" to a few titles by Toaplan: Seibu Kaihatsu with their Raiden (1990). This then became a complete and original series, also spawning another trilogy (the Raiden Fighters games). Chaos Field, on the other hand, may not be up to its sources of inspiration, but let's see why.
MECHANICS
You play with three buttons: A is normal fire (tap or hold down for a continuous stream of bullets), B is the sword (tap once for one swing, twice for the second swing, or three times for the third swing with both swords), and C is the change field function.
While the main attack is straightforward, the other two require some explanation. The sword can cancel bullets and deal damage to enemies. It can't cancel all bullets, though: homing lasers and purple, arrow-shaped bullets can't be cancelled. If you tap three times, the ship will use the left sword, then the right, then both swords, then it will need half a second to recover. So be careful, as this means you must dodge what you can't cancel. The change field function is an original and interesting idea: you can basically switch between order and chaos fields, meaning that you can choose between a more sedate variant of a stage (fewer attacks), where you get more meta-cubes and thus also more golden cubes by destroying stuff, but your attacks are however weaker... If you switch to the chaos field, on the other hand, your attacks will be stronger, you will get fewer meta-cubes by blowing up enemies, which will also be more aggressive (extra attacks and parts).
You will be immune to all bullets during the change, and they will also disappear... but you need at least five seconds to do a change. Now, what are meta-cubes? You have a special attack stock on your left, made of ten bars: every special attack uses one of them. If you don't shoot and move, they will automatically be siphoned to your ship. If you max out the bars, every extra meta-cube (gold in color) will be worth 10k. Special attacks are performed by pressing A+B or B+C: the former combination releases a shield, the latter a salvo of homing lasers (your ship will scan an arc in front of it to lock-on enemies and bullets). Both special attacks will start a combo based on the amount of cancelled bullets (you have up to five seconds to continue the combo, as shown as the time on the right: it's important to lock-on bullets, and not actually hit them, if you use the homing lasers attack, regarding the combo).
The amount of hits you place is divided by ten and then used as a multiplier for destroyed enemies' points (if you destroy parts of the enemies or the enemies themselves, of course). Let's make an example: you destroy with your final hit the first boss, doing a combo of 988 hits. 988 divided by 10 is 99,8: the boss value is 25k points. You then have:
25k x 99,8 = 2,495M
And you also get 10k points for every remaining second (all fights are timed). Interesting note: if you're too fast in destroying a boss (depends on the single boss), their basic value will be just 1k! Now, the flaws: The lock-on weapon can really slowdown things, when locking the maximum amount of targets (100 for Hal, for instance).
Slowdown seems intentional, in the sense that the ship still goes at the same speed... but the game really slowdowns completely, and this can be difficult to handle. In many sections it seems like they decided not to correct the issue, as the better choice is the shield, not the lock-on (for combo purposes). Not only that, but you also get frame-skipping on some attacks. That aside, characters are a bit imbalanced: Hal (mixed blue ship) is the character of choice, as many attacks are easier to combo with his shield. Ifumi (flawed red ship) seems to be too weak, while Jinn (fake yellow ship) has slow movement, close-range basic attack and difficult to use special attacks.
To sum up, the mechanics are good but flawed in some respects; some aspects are original while others are just following the latest trends. It's one giant boss battle, with three bosses per stage, one character is obviously stronger, and the slowdown can be annoying in some cases, as can be the frame-skipping issues which you get in some parts.
GRAPHICS
If you want good graphics from your game, you can stop reading here and spend your time on something else. The basic problem with the game is its rough aspect. All enemies and backgrounds are more or less rough, in the sense that they simply lack a decent number of polygons. This can be clearly seen in specific points like the second stage, where you confront a giant black planet... which is more like a polygon with a lot of angles. The Naomi may not be the newest hardware around, but many of its other games have quite a higher definition in the objects they display.
The backgrounds are also pretty simple, basically lacking any attractive details. Some backgrounds are not bad, however, especially in their "settings": the first stage is set on a metropolis, at night, and has its own appeal... Shame that the final part of the stage shows all the limits of the game, with a sort of nuclear reactor in the background, which is an indefinite mix of various stylistic elements. Other parts, however, are better: for instance, third and fourth stages are set in space, with the earth and the stars appearing in the background. Shame they look pretty bland, for the aforementioned reasons. What's really doujin-like, though, is the pretty obvious rip-off of various bosses from other games: references and homages have appeared in all shooters, but in this case, the programmers simply re-coloured bosses from other games and put them as enemies. You can actually test your STG knowledge by finding out which bosses have been ripped off from which other games. Final note: the three pilots have a generic, "alternative" look, not to mention that the various cutscenes are pretty bland.
MUSIC
Easily the best part of the game. The BGM is basically dance/techno stuff: if you don't like this genre (I don't, more or less), you may probably hate it. However, the two authors (Kou Hayashi and Daisuke Nagata, who also worked on Zanac Neo) have been extremely successful in producing a very interesting and original (for its genre) soundtrack, and certainly quite better than most of the average songs for these genres.
Basically, all songs can be ascribed to one dance subgenre; unlike most dance songs, however, they are not a simple loop repeated for just a few seconds. All themes are pretty elaborate and they evolve over their duration, like they slowly switch to a slightly different song: this is probably based on stage progression, as the songs' variations roughly correspond to the different phases of a stage. The most beatiful song is probably "Human Figure", a trancey lullaby, similar in style to the 808 stage songs, which has a nice final part, elaborating the two principal lines in one final theme. Very nice, too, are "Spinout " and "Back to the machine" (4th and 5th stage respectively), the former being a sort of old skool break-beat song (à la Marrs, or other '80s bands), the latter being pure Eurobeat techno! The boss theme, instead, sounds like a darker, vaguely "Nine Inch Nails-like" song, while the songs of the first two stages ("Not back in time" and "Coccus") are more on the "club/house" side. In any case, they are easily excellent and very complex songs, something very unusual, especially for videogame music.
LONGEVITY
The game offers a somewhat decent challenge, as it's not extremely easy, like some recent titles. The trick to play well is balancing order and chaos sections, by getting a full meta stock in order and then switching to chaos, since you're more powerful there. Comboing bosses is at the same time score-rewarding and a good way to survive (you cancel most of the bullets), but sometimes it's difficult to see what's going on. Like other titles, also, the differences between the various characters are a bit too exagerated: as I said, Hal is quite advantaged in many respects, and especially for his shield.
The basic problem with the game is fundamentally its doujin-like nature: it's not a bad thing, but the authors crammed too many homages and things they wanted to put together, without making something truly original (aside the field mechanic). Still, the stage layout, while focused on Hal (other bad thing) and his attacks, is pretty brilliant. All in all, it's an interesting game, even if it fails to attain an entirely unique and personal style. You probably won't play it for ages, but it's an interesting first game... I hope MileStone will do something more original, next time [Note that this review was written before Radirgy's release. --Ed].