Devil Blade: its lineage, descendants, and standing in Japan
01What this origin is
Devil Blade is a doujin vertical-scrolling shoot 'em up created in 1996 by the Japanese illustrator Shigatake (Takehiro Shiga), built with Dezaemon Plus, the PlayStation game-creation tool for making one's own shooters, and distributed only within Japan as an amateur work. Born from the Dezaemon movement in which players shared self-made shooters on memory cards, it embodies the Japanese arcade-and-doujin vertical shooter's core thrill of hugging your ship as close to the enemy as you dare to drive the score. With no surviving distribution of the 1996 original, its only available form today is the creator's own full remake a quarter-century later, DEVIL BLADE REBOOT, which reproduces the 1996 version in a retro mode; it is the origin of the aggressive, close-range score-chase strand of Japanese doujin shooting.
02Sources
03Buried gems that carry this root
DEVIL BLADE REBOOT Buried gem
A vertical-scrolling bullet-hell shooter, hand-drawn in pixel art yet pushed into a pseudo-3D rush with multi-layered scrolling and zooms. Two shot types plus a bomb, and the signature Berserk System: the closer you destroy enemies at point-blank range, the higher the difficulty and the score climb, a risk-and-reward design that rewards aggression with an arcade score-chase you cannot stop running back into. Six story stages with stage select, four difficulty levels, a Retro Mode that reproduces the 1996 original, Steam leaderboards and achievements, and unlocks. Made by the Japanese solo creator Shigatake (Takehiro Shiga), a founding member and illustrator of Vanillaware, who spent six and a half years finishing it alongside his day job as a personal doujin project under the SHIGATAKE GAMES label. It is the full remake of his own 1996 doujin shooter, originally built with the PlayStation tool Dezaemon Plus and distributed only in Japan. Overwhelmingly Positive at 822 reviews and 98 percent. It already plays in English (461 of those reviews are English) and the Western shmup scene has begun to notice it, but to the wider world it is still a near-unknown original.