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Arcade Archives: Tatakae! Big Fighter
Apr. 20th, 2025 11:25 amThis week's Arcade Archives release is... Tatakae! Big Fighter (Nichibutsu, 1989)
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Only the Japanese ROM (Tatakae! Big Fighter) is included which is a shame, as the other version out there (Sky Robo) has a different level order at the start. Preference Settings allow players to extend the edges of the game screen to see more than you most likely would've seen on a real cabinet.
It's Nichibutsu shmup time again! Not a company or a genre that I know much about, I'll be the first to admit, but Arcade Archives has absolutely been doing its best to teach me about both. This is a pretty interesting one in that you have a standard spaceship that fires straight ahead with a small hitbox but can only take one hit and is destroyed when it touches walls. Press the Transform button and you'll become a huge robot that can aim in eight directions, can take three hits and safely walk and fly against walls, but has a much larger hitbox. When you transform, you're surrounded by protective covering fire for a second, so if you time it right, you can use this to destroy enemy projectiles and even damage enemies! This is pretty alright and there's a nice variety of weapons (your craft has a secondary Beam weapon that changes independent of your normal shot, plus bombs and even and item to stop the screen scroling for a moment!) but it is a little slow for my liking, and the checkooints seem pretty rough. I think the novelty of the robot being able to fire in all directions helps smooth things over a little though, certainly one of the more interesting Nichibutsu shmups. Sorry I don't have much else to say, though!
Still, this is a pretty noteworthy release. As mentioned on arcade-history, this was one of Nichibutsu's last traditional arcade games, and from this point onwards they'd go all-in on the salacious mahjong games they'd been making throughout the '80s like Ojousan and City Love. This did bring us the completely bizarre Mahjong the Lady Hunter where the protagonist is a Batman-esque vigilante with the Nichibutsu owl as his logo, so maybe it wasnt all bad, but don't expect any of those games to show up on Arcade Archives any time soon! Still, there's a few other Nichibutsu games we haven't seen yet, in particular Dacholer and UFO Robo Dangar, so they're not finished just yet!
