DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou is now available on Nintendo Switch, bringing one of the toughest bullet hell shoot-’em-ups ever made to a current platform. It’s a port of the 2013 Xbox 360 version, via Live Wire (who did the Switch ports of DoDonPachi Resurrection, Mushihimesama, Espgaluda II, and Radiant Silvergun), and will set you back NZD $59.95
A bit of background: shoot-’em-up maestros CAVE released DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou in game centres in 2012 as a last hoorah before the company moved on from arcade games. And to really cap off that sense of finality came Inbachi, a hidden superboss that went undefeated for over decade and was largely deemed impossible. In 2021, a player called Sairyou finally managed to beat Inbachi… in training mode. This at least proved that the boss was beatable, albeit under absolutely perfect conditions that are very difficult to replicate in a real game.
Then, last year, Sairyou became the first person to clear the whole game, Inbachi included, without any continues. Last year. 2024. Twelve years after the game first came out.
Anyway, if you want to get in on some of that nightmarish fun, SaiDaiOuJou is now available on Switch. If you want to get in on a more moderate and reasonable form of said fun, know that Inbachi is very much an optional challenge—just triggering the fight in the first place requires near flawless play—and the console release of SaiDaiOuJou comes with a lot of different ways to tailor the difficulty and play experience to your liking. There’s an easier Novice mode, an arrange mode (the same underlying game but with revamped systems), and a variety of different settings and modifiers. It’s still a tough game on default settings, and even the Novice mode is nothing to sneeze at, but if you want to just credit feed and/or make yourself borderline invincible, you can do that.
The Switch release is a port of the Japanese Xbox 360 version, with no English translation for the global release, unfortunately. The main menus are in English, and the game is still very much playable even if you can’t Japanese (it’s an arcade action game, after all—not exactly text-heavy), but you may need to fumble around settings menus and use other resources in lieu of an English tutorial, like Shmups Wiki’s very detailed guide.
