Guwange

About Guwange

Guwange (1999) is Cave's arcade shooter set in Muromachi-era Japan, in which three people possessed by shikigami spirits fight their way to a malevolent god, steering their spirit to slow bullets and turn them into coins.

Guwange in Depth

Unusually for the genre, the screen often scrolls horizontally or diagonally, following the path to the demon leader. Each character has a limited bomb, an energy blast that can be sent in any direction and dispels bullets. The other special attack sends the shikigami into the enemies: it can attack in a different direction from the player's shots and slip past obstacles, and enemy bullets that touch it turn pink and slow drastically, resuming full speed once past it, while bullets caught in an explosion are cancelled into coins. Scoring depends almost entirely on collecting coins without interruption. Damaging or destroying enemies keeps a countdown meter topped up, and if it empties, the coin count returns to zero; since a single chain can run through the whole game rather than stage by stage, the scoring is extremely unforgiving.

In the Muromachi period, more and more people are possessed by shikigami, which grant great powers but kill their hosts one year later. Legend says that a host who gathers the talismans of the five elements from five demons serving Guwange, the god trapped in Mt. Gokumon, and then slays him will be freed. The heroes are Shishin, a masked man kept alive beyond a year because his shikigami feeds on the humans he kills; Kamono Gensuke, a 15-year-old trainee pharmacist possessed by a vengeful tengu; and Hiiragi Kosame, a 17-year-old shrine maiden whose fox spirit is willing to die to save her.

Making Guwange

Cave developed Guwange and Atlus published it in arcades in 1999, and Game Machine listed it as the seventeenth most successful arcade game in its 1 September 1999 issue. Each character has their own introduction and ending. At its December 2007 Cave fest, the company unveiled the Blue Label special edition, with greater difficulty in later chapters, which later appeared in cabinet form. Cave released the soundtrack on a Guwange/ESP Ra.De. album, and in 2010 an arranged album featuring Masafumi Takada, Akari Kaida and Yoshitaka Hirota among others. Mobile versions were released in two parts for i-mode and Yahoo! Mobile phones and later combined into Guwange DX with enhanced graphics. 5pb. developed an Xbox 360 version released worldwide on Xbox Live Arcade in November 2010, adding the Blue mode and an Arrange 360 mode in which the player fires automatically and the right trigger controls the shikigami independently.