Senxin Aleste - Original 1cc (No TLB)

Senxin Aleste was released in Japanese arcades back in July of 2021 and was dumped by hackers from the ALL.Net P-ras MULTI Ver. 3 Arcade service shortly after. I was able to get my hands on this and a launcher that would even play the game after many MANY hours of troubleshooting back and forth with a buddy of mine in Japan

Aleste is a long running shmup series that originally was on the Sega Game Gear and this marks its first entry released in arcades. Its highly unlikely this game will leave Japan unless the developers release it on consoles, which as of the time of writing this, has yet to be announced.

This game combines 90's style graphics with incredibly high quality 2021 music and audio. The explosions and bass drops really SLAP. There are 5 stages each progressively longer than the last and each containing a mid-stage boss and stage boss. There is a TLB (true last boss) that can be triggered after the final boss under various conditions. This clear was without triggering the TLB.

There are 4 difficulties to choose from. Novice, Casual, Original, and Expert. I didn't try Novice, but i did clear it on Casual after a few tries. The difficulty jump from Casual to Original was pretty intense and i think this maybe took 40 hours all together to clear (separated into 2-4 hour grinding sessions of course lol).

Instead of the usual shmup set up where you choose your ship/character and you get some lives and bombs, with Aleste you have all 4 ships available to you at once. You change which ship you want based on a power up that drops, and depending how long that power-up is on screen it will change between A, B, C and D, allowing you to switch to that ship upon pickup. When you are hit, you can trigger an auto-bomb-like effect (assuming you chose auto-bomb to be on) where your ship is in a powered up state and bullets are slower, but also patterns are far more dense. If you are hit and have no power-up state to be in, your ship will change to the next one in line and it will take time for that ship that was hit to 'recover' and be available again. However, picking up a power-up for that ship also adds health to them while they are recovering.

I was informed that by scoring in the powered-up-auto-bomb state, you decrease the amount of time needed for the ship switch/recovery drop to occur, i didn't utilize this but i imagine it would be very useful on Expert difficulty or trying to trigger and defeat the TLB.

The entire run becomes a delicate balancing act of keeping ships alive and ready to be switched to for various situations. The Type-D (yellow) ship is the unique one here, where the two spinning options (guns) around the ship will actually eat up bullets on screen, greatly reducing the difficulty of some patterns and increasing survival chance at the expense DPS compared to the other ships. A (red) has your standard forward shot, B (green) has guns that turn in the direction you move, and C (blue) has a wide shot. All ships have a focus or 'slow' shot you can enter by holding button 1 which is useful for focusing firepower on one enemy (bosses for example) and doing delicate dodges in dense bullet patterns.

The main strategy i tried to employ was switching to the D-Ship as often as possible for survival, particularly boss fights, and jumping to C for the high DPS and wide shot if need be. The other ships i just tried to play as best as possible if i was out C and D. Switching the D ship also bought me precious time to allow the other ships to recover. I truly didn't think i would clear it on this run as the final boss is not only very difficult, but i wasn't able to practice the patterns as well as i wasn't getting to the final boss often in runs (i have no ability to create save-states to practice as this wasn't being ran on an emulator per-se). Practicing the whole game over and over was incredibly exhausting, a full run is about 35 min long and stage 4 and 5 have so much room for error that the balancing act can easily become unbearable.

I don't think i will return to this game for some time (i have other shmups to go clear lol), but trying to go for TLB or even trying my hand at the Expert difficulty is something i would like to do in the future. If you want to play this game for yourself... well, thats not an easy thing to do, but if you are resourceful in your googling skills, you may be able to figure out how to. Otherwise, i do hope it gets a home release some day, i will certainly be one of the first in line to buy it.

I am hoping this video doesn't get copyright struck like the Cotton stream, but i think i am in the clear (hehe) for the time being. The video will be on my Twitch channel as well.

Much love ya'll. I stream most of my shmup grinding on Twitch and post 1cc's to youtube. I also play horror games once a week to spice things up a bit.

https://youtu.be/s97iOxZvIq0