Looking at the video of the playthrough of Touhou 10, despite it being one of the games with the best stage design, it is hard to not skip to the boss fights directly. In the newer games, I have an even stronger tendency to skip.

Yet the refrain that the stage portion provides seem to be a necessary one – games pretty much never provide only the boss rush experience, and that makes sense – the experience would be too intense.

But does the stage portion have to be the way it is in top-down shooters currently? My bet is on “no”.

Titan Souls and Cuphead provides clear counterexamples to top-down shooters. Both of these games have no “popcorn enemies”, and the main challenge are really navigating an unknown environment or interacting with NPCs.

My theory is that the refrain between boss fights can be anything – it could be navigating to particular spots, it could be solving some puzzles, it could be talking to NPCs in a way where relevant choices can be made – as long as it's relaxing and involving some element of choice, the experience could still feel consistent and enjoyable as a whole. This points to a possibility of improving the top-down-shooter experience.

(On the other hand, it's important to note that stage-music synchronicity can easily get lost without fighting popcorn enemies. And having the stage synced to music is itself a beautiful experience).

— Categorized under: #gamedesign #topdownshooters