by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Shikhondo: Soul Eater
  
• Developer- Deer Farm
  
• Publisher- Deer Farm
  
• Switch, PC
  

Shooters live on spectacle. A good shooter can get by on satisfying gunplay, but an exceptional one often enhances it with strong aesthetics and world design. Aesthetically, Shikhondo has it nailed. Its detailed, illustrated style evokes both modern anime and traditional Japanese ink paintings, with subtle animated touches. The animation itself uses popular paper doll style techniques, with small distortions to the illustrations to give them a bit more life. It’s an impressive look, and even the UI feels stylish. But even with this close attention to the art direction, Shikhondo has some major inconsistencies, which damage both the art and its readability as a game.

Shikhondo uses a familiar shooter set up. There’s a weaker, wider attack that allows you to move fast, a more concentrated weapon that slows you down and allows more precise movement, a special attack that’s powered by flying close to enemy bullets, and a limited stock of bombs used for clearing the screen. Anyone with experience with shoot-em-ups will immediately understand their function and the back and forth between slow, fast and special attacks serves Shikhondo well. But even here, at basic character control, there are small annoyances. For one, the shot types aren’t separated into different buttons. Instead, one button alters the properties of the main shot button, and the bomb and special attacks share the same button, which changes functions depending on the state, which feels more complicated than it needs to be.

Then there’s basic problems with the UI, which make it difficult to read. When moving slowly there’s a circular meter surrounding your character that fills as your special attack is powered up. It’s a good solution for keeping you focused on the action instead of looking away and getting shot. There’s also another elaborately detailed bar on the right hand side, which only after experimenting did I find out was the same meter that appears around your character. What threw me off was the glowing soul shaped animated icons, which read like remaining bombs, but didn’t seem to deplete when I used any of my attacks. 

Turns out the icons were completely decorative, and what was important was the thin bar underneath the icons which showed how full your special attack meter is. The soul icons only acted as markers toward that progress, which isn’t particularly useful since special attacks are only available when the bar is full. As it turns out, there’s also another set of soul icons that I missed near the bottom of the screen, which are the remaining stock of bombs, not to be confused with the other soul icon with the number next to it, which shows how many souls have been collected from enemies.

These might seem like minor issues, but I bring them up because they illustrate the kind of basic visual design problems that mar Shikhondo. It affects not only the surrounding presentation and UI, but basic game elements as well. There are problems with the layering of bullets–enemy bullets aren’t canceled out when using your special attack, and they’ll sometimes sneak through the hail of massive gunfire you’re outputting to kill you. Bosses have elaborate full screen introductions, but they’re much less impressive if you happen to be firing, since your bullets will obscure their artwork by appearing on top of them, even while everything else is hidden under them. So you get this stream of bullets, coming from nowhere, plastered over the elaborate painted character portraits.

Boss fights turn out to be a good illustration of the problems with Shikhondo’s approach to visuals. Their artwork looks great in fullscreen introductions, and often endows them with an intimidating presence. Then they shrink down to the playfield, where they feel miniscule and the details of the character art become lost. Shikhondo’s use of scaling in general feels like a misstep. While scaling pixel art has its own challenges, the game’s scaling hand drawn art creates a very ugly effect and gives even the best illustrations an amateur look. The thickness and quality of lines distorts noticeably, which makes objects look out of place and destroys visual consistency. Not only is it distracting, but it makes the game harder to read at a glance, and hard to play well. This becomes a repeated problem in both boss fights and during the stage. It damages the basic flow of the game, and makes it difficult to get the feeling of a consistent space.

Shikhondo is undeniably a beautiful shooter. Its mix of subtle animations and lavishly painted artwork stands out among its peers. It’s easily got the spectacle aspect of the shoot-em-up covered. But its flaws highlight the other aspect that make a shooter truly great, and the small touches you don’t notice until they’re absent. As it turns out a good shooter can shine with great aesthetics, but great aesthetics can also hide a weak shooter.