Hellsinker

By: Derek Yu

On: June 15th, 2012

Despite (because of?) being a pretty dense and esoteric doujin bullet hell shoot ’em up, Hellsinker has enjoyed a cult success over the years. But now that an English translation patch has been finished, perhaps more people can enjoy its unique flavor of shooting. Thanks to Noah! from the forums for posting enthusiastically about it a few months ago.

Like most shoot ’em ups, the goal of the game is to advance through the stages and earn a high score (called “spirit” in HS). However, Hellsinker also has a unique meter called “terra” that can deplete to send you to the Shrine of Farewell, a special boss rush level that resets your spirit counter but can end up doubling it if you’re good enough. There are many other quirks to the game, and the numerous ship types ensure that there’s a lot to understand here, whether you’re playing it in your native language or not.

Beyond that, if you’re interested in learning more about Hellsinker, you’re probably best off exploring it yourself or looking through the various guides that I’ve posted below along with the download/purchase links:

Noah!’s Original Thread: Link
Hellsinker Demo Download: Link
Buy the Full Game (JPN): Link (Be sure to add international shipping here!)
Buy the Full Game (ENG): Link
English Patch: Link

Wiki: Link
Shmups.com Guide: Link

TIGdb: Entry for Hellsinker

Posted in Abstract, Doujin, Shoot-em-ups, Windows | Tags: RuminantsWhisper

http://www.facebook.com/jamesmonkman James Monkman

Nice write up Derek!
Dular

“Like most shoot ‘em ups, the goal of the game is to advance through the stages and earn a high score?” Gee whiz, I never would have guessed!
Maxim

WOOOO! Now this is my kinda thing! I think I’m gonna buy it when my bank account has more than the $1 I need to keep it active.
iffi

Not sure if anyone will see this, but…

I haven’t been around here for a while (I actually deleted my forum account to keep myself from wasting too much time there), but I just wanted to say thanks to Noah! for posting this on the forums way back when. I didn’t play it then, but I finally got around to playing it around two weeks ago and now I can’t stop.

It took a lot more time than usual for a shmup to learn the basics of how to play each character, but the shooting just feels so satisfying (and your shooting technique actually makes a significant difference, unlike many shmups, Touhou especially, that deemphasize the shooting in favor of focusing on dodging, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing), and there are a crazy lot of interesting ideas in the game. If you’re interested in shmups, especially the bullet hell variety, and wonder what happened to all the innovation that seems to have gone missing from the genre, I highly, highly recommend this.

Also, don’t get scared by how complex it looks, it’s really simpler than it looks unless you’re going for score; most of the bars on the sides of the screen correspond to things that should be familiar to avid shmup players. I would recommend reading the Getting Started page on the Hellsinker Wiki (wiki.hellsinker.net), and focus on getting yourself familiar with one character before trying others, though do make sure you try all of them, because the variety in the shot types is one of the things that makes Hellsinker special. I personally think Minogame’s the easiest because of his(?) homing attacks and temporary invulnerability attack, but it’s easy to get into bad habits by relying on those.

And do try to at least survive long enough to get into the Shrine of Farewell. It’s probably the greatest thing I’ve seen in a shmup in a long time, and watching videos of it just isn’t the same experience.

For those playing on keyboard: You can’t really change the controls, only which of the fixed set of keys does what. In the gamepad configuration program, button 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 correspond to Z, X, C, V, O, P, and 1, respectively. If you use the English patch (which you should if you want to understand anything at all and you don’t understand Japanese), the version of the game the patch requires doesn’t support binding to Shift, so if you want to use Shift as the slow movement key then you’re going to need to use something like Autohotkey or something to rebind it yourself after setting the slow movement key to, say, button 7 (which corresponds to 1).

tl;dr: PLAY THIS GAME. YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF.
iffi

Oh, and in addition to the Getting Started page, take a look at the Game Glossary page if you want to learn more about the mechanics, and the pages for each of the characters and the user manual included with the game if you can’t figure out the shot types through simple experimentation.