Pocky & Rocky: Reshrining Expectations
It's hard to say that Pocky & Rocky Reshrined gives off the strongest first impressions when contrasted against its direct SNES predecessor. Pocky & Rocky largely defines itself by its incredibly powerful defensive tools – a melee swing that both deflects most projectiles, and knocks oneself backwards while hitting enemies as to safely keep away from contact damage; and a large, wide-spread shot that instantly clears most of the game’s enemies in a single hit – and by the adversarial approach it takes to challenging this toolkit. It responds to this power in kind with overwhelmingly dense, suffocating rooms of enemies that spawn out of nowhere and fire untelegraphed attacks on a dime, and with its most fiendish levels structured around enemies that respawn as soon as they’re scrolled off and back onto the screen in order to restrict safe retreats; the result is a consistently and constantly overwhelming game that nonetheless hands you the tools to be able to respond to its neverending pressure – but requires a reasonable heap of memorisation to be able to meet its challenges on their level, and is an experience of getting endlessly kicked down and held underwater until that level is reached. It’s maybe not surprising, then, perhaps in the pursuit of approachability, that Reshrined’s challenges lean towards the slower, less instantaneous and more reactable – lower enemy density and aggression, and much less spatial pressure – but those defensive tools stay largely unchanged, now clearly overpowering the game's new pace. Encounters no longer expect managing swarms from multiple avenues of pressure, and instead are built in a way where enemies can often be slowly and safely picked off one-by-one, leading to an experience that often feels rather toothless in comparison as per a lack of willingness to challenge the limits of your toolkit to a degree that coheres with its strength.
In fact, characters’ toolkits are overall much stronger in Reshrined, despite the surrounding context being much less demanding – often granting ways to bypass the movement and aiming restrictions that the games' cores are built on. New to the game is a charged variant of the basic shot, which differs for every character – this grants Pocky herself – as well as newcomer Ame-no-Uzume – access to a summonable crystal that, when shot, fires auto-aimed bullets towards the nearest enemy, allowing them to safely attack enemies positioned at awkward angles or behind corners without having to approach with any degree of commitment, and to attack enemies while running away from them if placed ahead of time. Rocky, in turn, gains a large boon from the game’s new green ‘wind’ shot type: his version firing paper planes with a wide spread and the ability to bounce off walls, which can completely lock down small enclosed arenas without so much as needing to aim. The clear winners, though, are Ame-no-Uzume and Ikazuchi, two new characters with traits so game-changing that you can literally see their effects ripple into the level design. Ame-no-Uzume boasts the ability to fly, not only allowing her access to character-exclusive secret items, but lets her simply glide over pits and water that would define the challenges of their rooms by heavily restricting space for any other character. On the other hand, Ikazuchi comes with an intangible, terrain-clearing leap as opposed to a dash, which itself grants access to a few secrets, but is rather defined by her orange 'fire' shot – a tracking laser that locks onto and auto-damages any enemy with more than a single tick of health – completely disrupting the dynamic of aiming being locked to eight-directional movement that defines the core of not just these two games, but the entire subgenre!
Of course, being a Tengo Project game, it’s never quite that simple; it could never just have been a straightforward, weaker reimagining of one of their previous games. Enter the third and final newcomer, and one of my new favourite women in the whole wide world: Hotaru Gozen.
Unlike the other new characters, who derive from the same core moveset as the titular Pocky and Rocky with a heap of extra privileges, Hotaru Gozen is more of a ground-up reimagining, and as such becomes more defined by what she can’t do, rather than what the levels can’t do to stop her. Rather than firing an infinite-range bullet, her shot 'projectiles' are simply an extension of her thrusting her naginata, meaning at max shot power it only covers less than half of the height of the screen – and at base power, has absolutely no range at all beyond the physical weapon itself. This lost range is instead redistributed across other areas of her toolkit – her melee swing is wildly bigger than any other character's – sweeping across a huge frontal arc around her, while matching the range of her base-power shot almost exactly! – and both of her charged attacks grant near full-screen range: her charged shot has her pull out an enormous bow and loose a flurry of arrows, and her charged melee unleashes a lingering projectile storm of metal that additionally holds melee attack properties – deflecting all projectiles that make contact with it. Of course, neither of these properties make up for the lost range on her shot: both types of charged attacks have a short wind-up before being fired, her bow attack locks her into place for about half a second while firing, and holding onto a charged melee swing prevents her from using that much faster, safer swing to defend herself at a moment’s notice. As her kit is so inclined towards medium-range combat, as opposed to the full-screen sniping that every other character can do without issue, she leans into a much more aggressive, active playstyle generally driven more by movement as opposed to hanging back and batting away projectiles at range. Her range limitations, and her time limitations on using what full-screen range she does have, restricts how safely and comfortably she can pick apart level setups, thereby leaning into a playstyle of much heavier aggression: running in with shots firing and a charged melee being held to take advantage of her extremely high mid-range damage, and gaining screen control not by slowly picking off enemies while retreating, but by attempting to take out enemies as fast as possible before they get the chance to fight back.
This wouldn’t be quite enough to turn the game around by itself – so much as Hotaru’s kit recontextualises the otherwise fairly pedestrian encounters in a much more interesting light, it still rarely edges close to the nail-biting experience that Pocky & Rocky can be. But, again, it’s never quite that simple; Reshrined is slightly more than just its combat-oriented design, and one of its most compelling dynamics stems from one of the most unassuming new additions: the game’s shop system. Killing enemies showers coins on the floor that can be walked near to collect, which can be selected and spent at shops scattered uncommonly across each level; these shops spin a roulette wheel to determine what item you get in return: most commonly a max-power upgrade of one of the three shot types, but could also be a shield, a komainu powerup, or even an extend, depending on the price of the shop. Certain shops, costing a steep 300 coins, grant a guaranteed extend, and seem to exist to frame the use of cheaper shops as a potential trade-off, perhaps pricing you out of being able to benefit from a guaranteed extend later on. Though for being a meaningful and fairly impactful addition, it comes off on the surface quite mildly for how much attention is given to it: presented as perhaps simply a cute nod to a Pocky & Rocky 2's own money and shop systems, and in motion as not much more than a cute little recovery method to bounce back from major shot power loss, but with a touch of chaotic flair – largely from hitting a shop, hoping to get something good, and having your shot type swapped to something totally different on the game’s whim.
But this plays into Reshrined’s greatest and most unassuming trick: it wasn’t just an iteration on Pocky & Rocky as a straightforward action game, it was pulling from much deeper, stranger, and bluntly anachronistic influences – the original Kiki Kaikai, and the long-grandfathered arcade secret language that rippled through cabinets since The Tower of Druaga. In Kiki Kaikai, beyond hitting score thresholds, the primary way of gaining extends is a secret revolving around score manipulation: revealing a bomb pickup while your score is a multiple of 1000 transforms said bomb into an extend item – this is, of course, never communicated in the game itself, despite more extends being available in this way than standard score extends. With this knowledge, it becomes clear that Reshrined's shop system is a much deeper iteration on this specific secret from its ancestor 36 years prior: the item gained from a shop roulette is not random, and is determined by the amount of total coins accrued across a run, trackable by the last digit of your coin count. This means that the perfect results from each shop can be reliably rigged – typically, a shield from the cheaper shops, and an extend from the more expensive ones – but doing so requires awkward enemy control and movement to land on the exact amount of coins needed to get the right result, from the showers that spew out of each enemy, while avoiding the very easy slip-up of accidentally picking up too many, or too few before they despawn. It’s interesting enough to dig into for its own sake, but it also winds up being somewhat central to the scoring system in the game – all health and shield items grant a massive score bonus if picked up with max health or shield, and all extra lives in stock get totalled into a large score bonus at the end of the game – so high level play becomes a strange confluence of typical top-level, no-miss arcade-action gameplay combined with the intimate knowledge and manipulation of esoteric, '80s-arcade playground rumours; perhaps a poetic ideal of all the different inspirations and eras that Reshrined aspirationally and inspiringly grasps towards.
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Thank you for reading, as always. I hope the opening criticism isn’t too off-putting! I don’t like being negative towards games – especially not ones that I’d really like people to take a look at! – but my initial impressions of it (which never really changed; I still hold all those criticisms) are sort of key to my relationship with this game. I also hope it’s a fun read. I wrote most of it in an all-consuming haze over the course of, like, two hours – both driven by a need to wring out my thoughts on this bizarre little thing, and perhaps a need to get something out at all – it’s been three months! I’ve got an awfully big backlog of games and topics I’d like to talk about, it’s just a matter of waiting for motivation and capability to strike, more than anything. I don’t want to make any promises, but… I’d like to try to put out something else this month, with all the free time I have until work starts again.
I’d say that if you want something close to the bite what Pocky & Rocky offers, playing on Hard as one of the less extreme characters is probably a fairly good option. Hard is quite transformative in this game, unlike in Pocky & Rocky – for better and for worse – and it makes the game far more punishing than the original even is, though the encounter changes won’t do much to push you in the way that SNES does. It’s still a fairly slow and plodding game, now compounded as such with increased enemy density and revenge bullets, but it’s not an easy ride without leaning on the obviously obscene stuff. Shot power drops like an absolute rock on Hard for taking a few little scrapes, so it’s probably some of the highest execution demand across the whole series. I’d like to push for a deathless on one of the more interesting characters one day, maybe?
I’ve 1CCed this a couple times off-recording in the past, but I recently landed a pretty good one as Hotaru (on Normal) not too long before writing, and I think it demonstrates a lot of what I’m talking about pretty well. Give it a watch if you’ve got a spare 48 minutes :p.
Okay, that’s all from me. I’ll see you next time. ~♡