Past meets present: Mamorukun ReCurse!

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

G.Rev’s shooters are at their best when there’s a clear, central mechanic to figure out and master. In Under Defeat, it was the option — always with you, but with a cooldown and three different types that change the way you have to approach the game’s challenges, depending on which you have equipped at a given moment. It played into the game’s scoring system, which was very much for the sickos: Under Defeat could still be enjoyed simply as a survival game, if that was all you wanted to do, but a deeper appreciation for its systems and what was on offer was there for the taking, should you want to devote yourself to learning its deeper intricacies.

Mamorokun Curse — styled as Mamorukun Curse! — is a very different game than Under Defeat, in a number of ways. Rather than a gritty, realistic-looking take on the helicopter shooter, Mamorokun Curse features a roster of adorable anime girls. Instead of a scrolling shooter, Mamorokun has you walking around on foot, Pocky & Rocky-style, positioning yourself where you would like to and selecting the paths you feel like taking. The screen doesn’t automatically scroll, but you can’t backtrack, either — it’s actually pretty purposeful with how it locks you out after you’ve made a decision in this way, and you have to learn to account for this scrolling in your own movement in order to get the drop or an angle on certain enemies.

And yet, at its heart, Mamorukun Curse shares more in common with Under Defeat than it does not where it truly matters. Both titles have scoring systems that require you play in a very different way in order to maximize your points, and a mechanic that you have to master — and utilize in a very situationally-based way — in order to both survive and put up a high score. Just like Under Defeat, there is a whole lot more going on here than it might first appear — that is anything but a simple scrolling helicopter STG, and Mamorukun Curse is not “just” a Pocky & Rocky-type shooter. It’s very much its own thing, and you have to figure out what makes it different and makes it work in order to see and enjoy it all.

Mamorukun Curse first released in Japanese arcades in July of 2008, and then made its way to the Xbox 360 in Japan, as well, the following summer. North America wouldn’t get their hands on Mamorukun Curse until 2013, when an enhanced, digital release hit the Playstation 3. That was it for Mamorukun Curse, until Sept. 25 of this year: Mamorukun ReCurse! launched on the Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox Series S|X, and Steam late last month, updated to include widescreen, multiple soundtrack arrangements as well as the original by Yosuke Yasui, and, like Under Defeat’s updated edition, twin-stick gameplay — a perfect and sensible addition to an overhead shooter with freedom of movement.

It’s the latest of G.Rev’s niche shooters to resurface in the present, and like with Under Defeat and Strania: The Stellar Machine, if you’re a fan of STG with some deeper systems, then this is one you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with. G.Rev, for those unfamiliar, was formed in mid-2000 by former Taito arcade division developers. They have developed a number of cult, niche shooters like Under Defeat, Strania, Kokuga, and Border Down, and co-developed others with far more mainstream attention, at least comparatively, such as Treasure’s Ikaruga and Gradius V, as well as Taito’s Dariusburst Chronicles Saviours, while handling the shoot ‘em up portions of IzanagiGames’ hybrid visual novel game, Yurukill: The Calumniation Games.

G.Rev is a small company — their website lists them as having 10 employees as of 2011, and it hasn’t been updated to say any differently since. This is how they end up co-developing on a number of titles, but despite the small size, there are still some big ideas here. And Mamorukun Curse — and now ReCurse — was designed around one of those.

The “Curse” part of the name is also the game’s central mechanic. You can shoot as you normally would in an STG — hold down the button or push the analog stick, in twin-stick mode, and fire infinite rounds in the direction you’re facing — but what you need to do is curse your enemies. Which you do with the press of a button that fires a special “curse” bullet. You can just fire off a single round of it with a quick tap, or hold the button for a larger, more powerful curse shot, and it has multiple uses.

The curse bullet can be used as a defensive measure: firing it erases other bullets from the screen temporarily. It can be used to curse your foes, making them not less but more powerful, increasing their difficulty — however, defeating a cursed enemy means you get more rewards from defeating them, which in turn racks up more points. Doing this against the largest, most difficult, most hard-to-kill opponents is a challenge you can set for yourself — they will fire off a bunch of suicide bullets in addition to their usual ones, giving you more and more to dodge, but defeating them while cursed will leave behind a ton of candy — yes, candy — for you to pick up, creating larger and larger scoring combos for you to benefit from.

And there’s one more wrinkle to the curse bullet that you have to consider: you can curse yourself with it. It makes enemies more powerful, but it can also make you more powerful — this won’t grant you a higher score, in the same way that cursing enemies does, but it does make you a walking anime girl of death for a brief period of time, and that might save your life on more than one occasion.

Here is what Nowa Kinugawa’s normal shot looks like in Mamorukun Curse, after you’ve powered it up a bit by collecting P-capsules to increase its power.

And here is what her shot looks like when you’ve cursed yourself so that your shot is on magical steroids:

That is way more bats. Way more bats. It’s overwhelming, how powerful you get when you’ve cursed yourself, but the effect is also brief: not only is a curse not permanent, but your curse bullet has a cooldown when you either curse yourself or charge it up for a more powerful curse of your enemies. You can’t just spam the curse, basically, but have to deploy it strategically, regardless of whether you’re doing it to enhance your scoring or because a ship has pulled up alongside you and has a dozen living cannons of various sizes that you have to wipe out before it can fill the screen with fire.

Through the curse bullet, you can balance survival and scoring, situationally, maximizing the latter by cursing smaller enemies to make them worth more and more points to extend and enhance your candy combos, and doing a better job of ensuring the former by cursing yourself whenever you’re feeling like you need a little boost to get by. Which can be constantly, too, given that the longer you live, the more points you’ll score, anyway. And it’s worth remembering, too, that Mamorukun Curse features timed levels: you can’t just burn your precious seconds making every single enemy tougher to score as many points as possible, because you’ll either 1) run out of time and lose or 2) give up a whole bunch of points you could have scored post-level through the remaining time bonus. Curse yourself, regularly, to push through levels more quickly without ignoring enemies at all to do it.

You don’t want to just hold down the fire button the entire time you play Mamorukun ReCurse, as tempting as it might be to do since your rank doesn’t increase simply by firing off your guns constantly. The reason for that is because there is vacuum-effect for collecting whatever candy you have caused to appear by destroying enemies, objects, or treasure chests in a stage, but it only activates when you let off of the fire button for a moment. This also allows you to better time your combos by stretching out your collection of candies to the last millisecond — let go of the fire button to collect what shows up to extend a combo and ensure you have more time to find the next batch, rinse and repeat, and see the points go up up up.

Rather than lives, Mamorukun ReCurse has you select three of seven characters for a playthrough, in whatever order you want them to appear. If they take any damage, they are knocked out, which then gives you the next character in line to use. You can recover your lost characters by picking up hearts that are hidden in each level: sometimes they are in chests, sometimes in hidden enemies that are found juuuuuuust out of the normal view of the game’s camera unless you head right towards it, and sometimes only on alternate side paths that lock you out of the standard one. You want these, regardless of whether you have to recover a fallen ally or not, as picking up a heart with everyone already healthy grants you 30,000 bonus points. And even if you don’t care about the points, necessarily, learning where all of these hearts are is to your benefit: you will need them on one run or another, especially as you play the game’s tougher difficulties.

The seven characters all handle differently, both in terms of speed and their shots. The character select screen tells you what their deal is at the bottom right. Mamoru Tomoka is “for novices,” and their shot type is “straight” — this works how you think it would, with a no-fuss straight-on shot that ends up five blasts wide when powered up. Mayuno Miyaki is also a straight shot, but hers are for advanced players, as they have a different shape and movement than Tomoka’s rigid setup. Kinya Narai has a wide shot, designed for novices due to it being more forward-facing, while Benigo Higadera’s wide shot is spread even further and meant for advanced players. The last three characters have more specialty arrangements, with Fululu Jigokudani’s shot described as “no holds barred” and “strongest” since it can lay a ton of damage on, and fast, on a narrower range, while Luchino Narugami’s two-way shot — narrow, forward-facing but with a secondary bullet sniping effect — is for novices. The aforementioned Nowa has a homing shot, with a weak center but enemy-seeking waves of bats fired on the wings.

Mix and match for your own playstyle — maybe you want one of Nowa or Luchino so you have that secondary homing or snipe with one character, and maybe you prefer the advanced wide shot of Benigo but the novice straight shot of Momura. Consider, too, that each of these characters has a different cursed effect on their main shot: you might find that you really enjoy Kinya’s variant on the wide shot, but do not love that his cursed effect dilutes its impact by firing it in all directions rather than at any particular target or direction. Or, you might appreciate that kind of eight-way assault, and so take him over Benigo when deciding which wide shot to take. And hey, nothing says you can’t just pick both, either.

There is a surprising amount of game here, if you aren’t familiar with Mamorukun Curse. Not only does the ReCurse! edition include the original arcade mode, but there is also a story mode with selectable difficulty, and a slate of challenges which range from single-stage scoring challenges to large slates that you must survive, with additional difficulties unlocking as you complete each of them.

They all play a bit differently, too: in the story mode, you’re limited to five characters to choose from, but you can also pick all five. There are fewer revival hearts, but the ones you do find revive more than one fallen character — you’re going to have to master more than just a couple of characters in order to see the story to completion. The levels are all arranged differently depending on which mode you select, as well, so it’s not as if mastering the layout of the challenge levels prepares you for the story, or that even one set of challenge stages has you ready to take on another set of them. Hell, one of the challenges is just based around finishing in a hurry, not just because you only have a little bit of time, but also because a grim reaper is chasing you around the stage the whole time trying to ruin your life by making fatal contact with you.

The best part? If you’ve got a favorite, you can spend most of your time within that specific mode, as each is robust in its own way. The challenge levels, especially, will provide you with hours upon hours of gameplay, as the various arrangements of these stages, and the differing orders and tweaks made to them, ensure that you’re going to have no shortage of things to do and master — the jump from easy to even medium as far as difficulty goes is a significant one, never mind beyond that. Mamorukun ReCurse has got that “one more play” thing going for it, in that you can always tell how you messed up and could have done better, so you won’t feel discouraged by the difficulty jumps so much as feeling you want to give it another shot — maybe this time with a different deployment of those curse bullets.

If you’ve played Mamorukun Curse in the past, there is plenty of reason to pick up ReCurse — the fact that it’s meant to be the definitive edition of the game, with the various modes and soundtracks and the widescreen and twin-stick support, means that you’ve never actually played the game before even if you have, as ReCurse certainly succeeded in its mission of being the version of Mamorukun Curse to experience. And now it’s on a far wider number of platforms digitally, with physical editions available for the Switch and Playstation 5, more people can experience this gem now than have ever been able to play any of its previous forms.

Mamorukun ReCurse! released on Steam, Xbox Series S|X, Nintendo Switch, and Playstations 4 and 5 on September 25. A review copy for Nintendo Switch was provided by publisher City Connection and Clear River Games, and played on a Nintendo Switch 2.

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