{"id":162,"date":"2006-02-03T22:32:29","date_gmt":"2006-02-03T21:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=162"},"modified":"2020-10-11T21:09:04","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T20:09:04","slug":"lilian-fourhand-nuclear-soeur-fighters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=162","title":{"rendered":"Lilian Fourhand – Nuclear Soeur Fighters"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Lilian Fourhand is an on-foot shooter featuring characters from Maria-sama ga Miteru. Its not a million-miles away from games like Konamis Contra\/Probotector series in that you go from left-to-right shooting things, interrupted along the way by an assortment of bosses to take down. In Lilian Fourhand, however, the stages auto-scroll – you can’t take things at your own pace as it just keeps moving.<\/p>\n

Rather than having a default character who picks up an assortment of weapons, you get to choose one of three Soeur pairs with fixed attacks. Each of the pairs have their own attack, but since you control both at once (and they both shoot at once) you don’t really need to worry about that other than knowing you’ll be firing two attacks at once. Complicating things further is that you get enemies walking along the background taking pot-shots at you, who can’t be taken down with regular attacks – you need to lock-on to them (there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a choice of lock-on methods, but Auto is for wimps) making things rather more tricky than simply having to shoot. You can actually lose one of your characters down a pit. If you lose your main character, you’ll reappear with a chunk of your health missing. If you lose your petite soeur they’ll disappear for a short while, taking your lock-on skill with them. Eventually they’ll float down from the top of the screen and you’ll have to make contact with them to bring them back into action – miss them and you’ll have to wait a while longer and try again.<\/p>\n

The game has six stages set in different surrounds you’ll recognise if you’ve seen the anime version of Marimite, and with the exception of level 6 (which is basically a boss-rush stage, pitting you against bosses you’ve thought previously before throwing you against the final boss) the levels follow the same basic pattern of having two bosses – one half way through the stage, and one end. The bosses, unsurprisingly, are all characters from the series. It’ll raise a few smiles from those who are familiar with the series, though not likely as much as a laugh.<\/p>\n

I really like Lilian Fourhand. Its a really polished, really playable game. It looks about as nice as a game like this can, the music is suitable and pleasant, and the stages are really well done, not simply being wave after wave of the same attacks. The game itself is fairly short, though you’d have to be pretty good to get through the whole game in the “normal” difficulty in one go with only the credits you are given by the game. If you are the obsessive type, the desire to improve your game and score is there in spades. Truthfully, its just incredibly playable a game – the only possible blackmark is that having separate buttons to shoot left and right is a bit awkward, but given you need to shoot in the opposite direction to which you walk fairly often (particularly against bosses) its forgivable, particularly given you get used to it pretty quickly.<\/p>\n

Its not going to give the upper echelon of the professional genre games much of a head-ache – it falls a little short of the likes of Contra III, though it feels a little fairer a game to me than Metal Slug (that may just be that I suck at that game) – but its definitely worth a look if you a genre obsessive or a MariMite fan boy.<\/p>\n


\nGame Mechanics – How to Play<\/b><\/p>\n


\nControls
\nArrow keys – Move
\nN – Shoot Left
\nM – Jump
\n< - Shoot Right\n> – Dash
\nF5 – Pause<\/p>\n

I recommend using a joypad if you have one, particularly since you can reconfigure the buttons to something more reasonable, unlike with the keyboard controls. I’ve had trouble shooting upwards whilst moving left\/right using the keyboard as well – in that it doesn’t seem to work. It works fine with a joypad, and makes things rather more doable.<\/p>\n

You can also dash by tapping left or right twice should you wish, as well as dashing mid-air. Its also possible to do a second jump whilst mid-air, though like most of these things it can only be done once. You can also crouch, though it doesn’t give you much benefit to do so.<\/p>\n


\nThere\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s two choices of shooting methods selectable from the character select screen. Wimps will go for auto – you just need to hold down the button to send a stream of bullets flying constantly, whilst releasing the button will automatically lock-on to anyone walking across the background. Manual will only fire a short spout of bullets when the fire button is pressed, meaning you have to repeated tap the fire button to shoot. To lock-on in manual mode you need to hold-down the shoot button, and release to shoot.<\/p>\n

You can’t, however, shoot straight upwards. Pressing shoot whilst pressing up will shoot at a diagonal in the direction you press the shoot button in. You can, however, jump on characters heads without taking damage (and its essential to know this if you want to beat some of the later bosses).<\/p>\n

Watch out for the red birds – they drop power ups. The powerups available are:-
\n“Shot” – Powers up your regular attack for a limited number of shots
\n“Invisible” – Makes you unshootable (or untargetable, at least) for a short while
\n“Recover” – Refills your health
\n“Laser” – Power up to your lock-on attack, giving you extra shots
\n“Bonus” – Gives you a bunch of extra points<\/p>\n

Anything else which is dropped by anyone else (stars, cake, fruit, etc) are just for extra points.<\/p>\n


\nCharacters<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sachiko and Yumi
\nAttack Power – 3
\nAttack Range – 5
\nLock-on – 8<\/p>\n

The game states this as the beginners choice thanks to their long attack range, wide bullet spread and rapid fire. I probably wouldn’t go with them period, myself, the other characters simply seems far more effective.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Shimako and Noriko
\nAttack Power – 4
\nAttack Range – 3
\nLock-on – 10<\/p>\n

The intermediate choice, and my prefered choice. Shimakos boomeranging crucifix fire has a decent range and a good coverage area, whilst Norikos shotrange bomb-like (or is that Jizu bead-like?) shots are really damaging – they may have a lower attack rating than Rei and Yoshino, but its pretty hard to actually see – if anything, you’ll probably find yourself sapping bosses energy gauges far more quickly with this pair, particularly with the ‘shot’ power-up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rei and Yoshino
\nAttack Power – 5
\nAttack Range – 2
\nLock-on – 12<\/p>\n

Expert choice. Reis attacks are really short-range without a ‘shot’ power-up. To attempt to make up for this they’ve given Yoshino a homing shot. The homing shot does make them good for picking up those stray enemies if you are going for a decent score, though its not very rapid fire. The high lock-on value seems to come at a cost – their lock-on attack seems weaker than the other
\ncharacters, some enemies other characters knock-out in a single attack takes two for them.<\/p>\n


\nExtras<\/b><\/p>\n

There are a few extras hidden in the game to reward the obsessive gamers. The first thing one might notice is that for every half hour you clock up playing the game you unlock an extra credit, and eventually (after about six hours I think) you will unlock freeplay mode (which will make Hard Mode rather more doable).<\/p>\n

There are a few less obvious ones, however. Firstly, you want to be looking at completing the game with all three pairs of characters. Its easier than you might think – complete the game with Shimako and Noriko on Easy mode, then simply replay the last stage with the other doing. Doing this will unlock…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yumi and Touko
\nAttack Power – 5
\nAttack Range – 5
\nLock-on – 9<\/p>\n

Yumi plays like she does with Sachiko – a wide spread of fairly weak but rapidfire attacks. Touko, unsurprisingly, fires drills attacks which are very damaging, but whilst moderately rapid there is a bit of a delay before they go flying off. They top Shimako and Noriko, however, simply because Toukos drills have a full-screen range as opposed to Norikos short range.<\/p>\n

Complete the game using Yumi and Touko (again, just the last stage will do) will allow you to do a custom character selection by pressing either up or down on the character select screen – this allows you to use the all-conquering combination of Shimako and Touko.<\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Completing the game as Yumi and Touko should also open up the Special option on the main menu. This gives you a bunch of extra points game modes –<\/p>\n

Endless – Endless stream of opponents.
\n1000Junk – Kill 1000 opponents as quickly as possible.
\n2 Minutes – Kill as many as possible in 2 minutes.
\n3million pts – Gain 3m points as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n

The rest are an assortment of vs. boss challenges. The Endless, 1000Junk, 2min and 3m modes are pretty insane with the number of opponents they throw at you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lilian Fourhand is an on-foot shooter featuring characters from Maria-sama ga Miteru. Its not a million-miles away from games like Konamis Contra\/Probotector series in that you go from left-to-right shooting things, interrupted along the way by an assortment of bosses to take down. In Lilian Fourhand, however, the stages auto-scroll – you can’t take things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doujin-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6407,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions\/6407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}