Ten and Till is a really obscure Cave inspired doujin shmup that is quite a gem. The low-quality pixel art and the music is really well-done and the gameplay and scoring system is super solid as well. The atmosphere and presentation is excellent as well.
Quite amazed that barely anyone has heard of it, despite it being so good.
In this game you can switch between Ten and Till by pressing the focus button. Ten is the fast forward-focus type while Till is the slow wide shot. You can also switch between the L-shot and the S-shot for both characters, which stands for long shot and short shot respectively. The short shot is, like the name says, very short, but does a ton a damage. Pressing focus to switch characters is not very intuitive though, so you can see me switch sometimes when I don’t want to.
The game has a shield mechanic. You can pick up a shield item that eats one-hit, and you can stack up to three of them. The invincibility frames you get from these shields is very little though, so it’s pretty easy to get chain hits if you’re not careful.
Extends in this game are score-based, you need to score quite well in order to get some of the later extends. Bombs are gotten through item carriers, but there are also some hidden bombs. In stage 1, 3 and 5 there is a spot where the ground sparkles. If you shoot that spot a bunch, a bomb will pop out.
Scoring in this game consists of /”making enemies shine/” by fulfilling certain conditions. 90% of the time this means pointblanking an enemy. The short shot is about the ideal length for this. For bosses and certain special enemies you need to delay killing them until they shine by themselves. Killing enemies when they shine gives you their full value and adds their value to the overall multiplier. What value they give depends on the enemy type. Big enemies and bosses give by far the most, so you definitely want to make those shine. In order to get the shine on bosses, you need to see all of their patterns. You can’t speedkill them into their final phase and then wait.
The second part of scoring in this game is the maximum shield bonus, and this works pretty much like the maximum bomb bonus in Dodonpachi. Every extra shield item you pick up when you’re already at the max stock of three, adds a multiplier to the enemy value (and activates the overall multiplier?).
If you get hit, you need to pick up two shield items to activate it again, effectively making you lose two multipliers to the maximum shield bonus. Getting hit also makes you lose 2000 units to the overall multiplier. I got hit once in the cave stage, but fortunately it was at a spot where I could pick up two shields items immediately and restore the maximum bonus.
There is a scoring trick in this game where you suicide twice at the beginning of the game to give yourself more shields and more maximum shield bonus. However it’s far more beneficial to save those resources for the end bonus. There seems to be some exponential equitation going on, as a 9/9 clear is worth a whopping 320 million. Almost half of what you get during the main game. Bombs especially are worth a crapton.
The requirements for getting the TLB is no continues and getting at least 50 million points. You need to beat the TLB without using continues to acquire the true ending of the game.
The game has an an option to enable auto-saving. What this means is that the game saves your progress between stages and you can reset to try again as much as you want. There is no score penalty for using it either. Obviously for a full run you want to turn it off.
The game is not terribly hard to just clear, it’s very friendly for beginners since it gives you a lot of resources and there’s also the auto-saving feature. There is still a lot of appeal for experts though, since the scoring is very risk/reward and the optimal scoring pretty much requires you to never get hit or use a bomb ever. The later stages get quite tough too.
The only downside to this game I’d say, is that it’s quite long and that the early-game is quite a drag after a while, which is really unfortunate. Stage 1 is literally like 7 minutes long, which is really unnecessary for how simple it is. I don’t really approve of boss re-fights in shmups either. You already fight them every run!
Overall this was a pretty great run. The only two big mistakes were getting hit it in the cave stage and accidentally killing one of the bosses too early. You can get the shine on the final boss, but that was definitely not worth it at this stage, since you need to dodge the final for like 30 seconds.
Buy the game here:
http://www.dlsite.com/eng/work//product_id/RE181041.html
Game website:
http://nishinotoro.web.fc2.com/tentil_top.htm
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