Shinorubi feels like a game that came about by providing prompts to an AI specialising in video game building (coming soon, no doubt), feeding it information on various historical works of a particular nature, and then publishing whatever it spat out. That might sound mean to the humans that created it, but it’s an apt descriptor nonetheless.

Shinorubi has the odd misfortune of getting worse depending on the size of your screen. On our 55” panel, the experience was somewhat shocking. Filling the full 16:9 aspect and played in a vertical format, the player ships are enormous, with a giant pink jewel on their nose to dictate the hit-box area. Each pilot has different shot types, underpinned by a straightforward shot, laser, and bomb setup, as well as a fever power-up mode that’s triggered by collecting stars. It appears Shinorubi runs at 30fps, but on a large flatscreen is so janky it's hard to say. Every ship in the game, with their various pros and cons, travel at extreme speeds to cover the play area, requiring inappropriate firing of the laser just to quell the weird skating of their movement. The larger the screen, the more prone you are to accidentally crash into bullets, not helped by laggy controls, and everything seems to stutter slightly. When you die in docked mode, it’s not because the game is overly difficult, but because you’re struggling to understand the action.

The graphics too, are frankly horrible. Drawing upon the worst of Cave’s pre-renders, it’s shiny metallic and inhumanly plastic; and, bar stage two’s lightning storm, appears to be exactly the same stage background repeated throughout, only with the assets rearranged. The attractive menu presentation is all pink, but the game itself is an unsightly fluorescent green. It’s also one of the only shoot 'em ups we can remember where we actively disliked the bullet aesthetic.

Additionally, having opted for a design that spans the display in widescreen — not the first choice for the genre — it features bullet patterns we have very little respect for. It’s not entirely the developer’s fault, but arranging patterns that have a geometrical certainty changes fundamentally when you have three major planes of activity: the left, the middle, and the right. Some of the patterns seem to have no real obvious thought. The game often rains down bomb icons, too, which feels like a, “Here, let me patch that mess you can’t possibly navigate out of real quick.”

The saving grace is that Shinorubi works far better in handheld mode. It doesn’t look as displeasing, the boss designs are pretty heavy-duty, the frame rate doesn’t seem to be as messy, and your ship, while still overly quick, can travel the screen with greater ease. If you’re playing it portable, there’s some fun to be had with its various modes, of which it’s stuffed to bursting: boss rushes, caravan trials, a Muchi Muchi Pork-inspired rebounding pig score game (more interesting than the default, honestly), and a three-loop Journey event. The music, too, if you enjoy endless guitar solos, is well-executed and appropriately heavy.

We can’t recommend you purchase Shinorubi over other games in the genre, but, in handheld mode, there’s thankfully still something for diehard fans to play for, if only out of curiosity.